Play Dead
by tripping fruit
Summary: Dead? Spike's got better things to be doing than being dead--like dreaming up crazy schemes...
1. Ordinary World

Glee.  Chapter two, here we are.  I know you all were just _dying _for it, so, yeah.  Have at.

Jet had advised him that what he was doing probably wasn't the brightest idea ever.  He'd heard that a _lot_ in his lifetime; people telling him that what he was doing was flat out _stupid_.  Not like he had ever let it faze him, but whatever.

"Oh yeah, she got over it—_eventually_," Jet argued, arms folded over his chest.  "I just think you'd be better off leaving her alone.  Or at least meeting her again in a different manner, for Christ's sake."

"For Christ's sake yerself, Jet!" Spike had laughed.  "What're you, Faye's daddy?  Is it okay if I take her out for the night, huh Mr. Black?  Huh?  I promise to have her back by midnight!"  He had laughed about the image of Jet being Faye's dad for a few more seconds, and then shrugged.  "Nah.  I've gotta do it this way.  I've got to have the element of surprise—otherwise, she won't come with me.  I know the shrew woman.  She's stubborn as hell.  I have to catch her off guard."

Jet gave up, eventually, remembering how futile it was to try to talk Spike Spiegel out of something once he had set his mind to it.  "Fine.  Whatever.  I'm not paying for her psychotherapy bills when the shock sends her to an institution."

So there Spike sat, in a diner in Tharsis City, in a booth, absorbed in reading a newspaper.  Well, he _was_ reading it, but it was partially because he wanted to look up from it and scare the shit out of Faye.  _I always did have a flair for the dramatic_, he mused, reading an article about how the body of a murdered lawyer had turned up in several pieces about Tharsis last Tuesday.  The writing wasn't all that great.  _I could be a MUCH better journalist, if I really applied myself to it._  He knew he was sitting in Faye's section because he'd discreetly asked another waitress if he could sit in her section.  He hadn't seen the shrew around anywhere yet; but then again, it _was_ busy, and he figured she was probably busier with keeping her job than she was looking for vaguely familiar, tall, fluffy-haired men.

He reached out from behind his paper and grabbed his coffee mug, which had actually been brought to him by another waitress in a little pink waitress getup.  Spike had snickered to himself at the thought of stubborn Faye giving up the bounty hunting life and trading her Glock in for a nametag and a cute, ass-hugging little pink number.

He always _had_ thought that women in uniform were too damn cute for their own good.  Put a woman in a uniform and he couldn't tell them apart anymore.  All he saw was the cute little uniform.

His coffee tasted a little funky, but hey, whatever.  It wasn't like he was in the nicest diner ever.  It was just a regular old antique-designed diner, with malts and sundaes and club sandwiches and burgers.  However, it was in a highly populated section of Tharsis, just a hop, skip and a jump away from the center of downtown, and it seemed like it generated enough business to make a decent living off of.  

Hell, business didn't even seem to be hampered by the fact that it was pouring outside.  _April showers bring May flowers_, Spike recited in his brain, his hand groping around for his coffee mug again.  He couldn't set his paper down, for even just a second.  He was relishing the pseudo-cloak and dagger routine too much.  He just hoped that Faye didn't up and faint or anything typically female like that.

He'd given up on reading the paper for a while and instead held it in front of his face while he gazed out the window at the people skittling back and forth outside in the downpour.  Some people had umbrellas, some people, like him, decided to just wear a trench coat and ignore the fact that they were getting soaked.  Spike had never owned an umbrella.  Maybe it was the reason why he got colds so often.

He was halfway through an article that he actually found somewhat palatable when the sounds of papers tearing in front of his newspaper shield caught his attention, and he heard a very heavy and audible sigh.  _Ah, so she's not the natural waitress type_.

"How're you today, sir?" she started, obviously guessing from the legs under the table and the fingers around the edges of the giant newspaper that he was a he.  "Do you know what I can get for you yet, or do you need some more time to look at the menu?" 

It was finally there.  The climactic reunion scene in the middle of the play that he was a willing actor in, and she an oblivious one.  _Lights, camera, action._

"Yo, Faye," he greeted at first without dropping the paper, waiting for her anticipated silence, and then slowly lowered it to reveal him sitting in the fire-engine red booth, grinning out at her from underneath a mop of unruly hair.  "Wanna refill my coffee?  This one's running a little low."

Faye Valentine froze.  Her pen and order tablet twitched once, twice, in her hands.  After that they just kind of stopped.  Her formerly chin-length purple hair was pulled into a short, messy ponytail on the back of her head, and sure enough, there was a slightly crooked little nametag pinned on just above her left breast—_Faye_, it read.  Her bright red lipstick clashed with the muted carnation of her uniform, and what appeared to be a splatter of mustard adorned one of her short, cuffed little sleeves.

In other words, she was what Spike had always remembered her as—a disaster disguised as a polished human being.  Faye always seemed like she was trying to drag herself in fifteen different directions at once without even realizing she was doing it.

"You're _dead_," she hissed, wide-eyed.  Of course, the obvious reaffirmation of the supposed truth.  Spike had halfway expected that statement to come from her lips.

"Oh, tsk, Faye," he sighed, folding the newspaper and laying it down on the table with a soft _thwap_.  "Surely you know that dead men cannot order coffee, let alone come into a diner for some breakfast.  So, are you gonna take my breakfast order and get me some more coffee or are you just going to gape at me all day?"

Quite suddenly she threw her pen at him, and it bounced harmlessly off his shoulder, landing in his lap.  He raised his eyebrows and sniffed.  "Well, if _that's_ the way you feel about it, I'll just be on my way, thank-you-very-much."

"You are _dead!_  What in the holy _fuck_ are you doing bothering me, let alone wandering around with a solid form that pens bounce off of?" she hissed again, obviously not too keen on letting people around them know what was going on.  

"Just like you to be so ridiculously self-centered," he replied in chagrin.  "What makes you think I would come back from the dead—if indeed I _had_ actually been dead—just to haunt you?  I'd up and kill myself again if that ever happened."  He watched her mouth quirk downwards in quiet rage and confusion, and some colourful expletives work their way out of the same mouth a split second later.  "Oh dear.  Such language."

"So you're not dead," Faye spat, suddenly accepting.  She obviously caught on a lot quicker than Jet.  "No one who had actually died could possibly be this annoying.  But I'll tell you what—I still don't give a flying rat's ass.  I want you to get up out of this booth right now, and get the hell out."  She screwed up her mouth in a tight little pucker that looked like a cherry.  "Get out, don't come back, and I'll pretend like this never happened."

Spike feigned repulsion.  "Now you're being just plain _rude_, Faye.  Sheesh."  He looked around him at the inside of the diner in mock wonder.  "Well, beat me with a stick.  Who woulda thunk that a Romany like you would have ended up settling for such a modest little establishment to become the diva of?"

Her face remained, on the whole, deceptively calm, but Spike swore he could hear enamel cracking on her teeth.  "I'm going to say it one more time and then I'm going to start screaming.  Get.  _Out_."

Spike said nothing, only stared at her for a moment, and then quick as lightning reached out with one long arm and snagged a passing waitress, who turned in shock at the grip on her arm.  She relented a bit when her gaze met a sincerely smiling Spike Spiegel.

"Oh, uh, 'scuse me," he said, doing his best to ignore Faye and hoping she wouldn't spout anything out.  "I'm an old friend of Faye's here, whom she hasn't seen in many years, and I was wondering if maybe, just _maybe_ she could take her break now and you could cover her tables?"  He gave her the best puppy dog eyes he could muster and she grinned, showing off dimples, and then nodded.

"Okay.  Sure thing!" she agreed, and then walked off, leaving Spike to gaze after her somewhat.  _Those damned uniforms.  _He turned back to Faye and slid out of the booth, grabbing her by the arm and silencing her sudden, loud protests with a mildly fierce jerk.

"Walk with me, beautiful," he said, in a voice that hovered between pleasant and unpleasant.  He dragged her along briskly to the front door of the diner and then opened the door and unceremoniously tossed her out.  "After you," he muttered, and then followed.  

Faye yelped and jumped back from the rain, back under the small awning that hung over the door.  "What do you think you're doing, you—_lunkhead!_" she screeched over the sound of water pounding on concrete.  Spike narrowed his eyes and held up one hand, indicating that he wanted at least some measure of silence.

"I'm not dead.  I never was dead.  White Tigers found me, took me to a hospital, I got back on my feet.  Now I'm staying with Jet on the Bebop.  I came to—"

She stamped her foot, a most Valentine-esque thing to do: throw a hissy fit.  "What do I _care_?  You bastard!  I'm shocked Jet even let you back on the Bebop after your little stunt.  Going to find out if you were _really_ alive.  I've never heard a bigger crock of shit in my life," she said with a flourish, but then decided that she wasn't done after all.  "Oh, but not like you care, just 'cause we were a ship full of people who for whatever reason decided to up and care about you, but we were _nothing_ on sweet little Julia!"

Spike had expected her to throw that in his face.  A year ago he might have snapped, lashed out at her, screamed at her to never say Julia's name again.  Instead, he just closed his eyes and gave a patient little smile.  "I might not be dead, but Julia is, Faye.  Let's not talk about it, okay?  That's not going to get us anywhere, anyway.  If you're trying to piss me off to the point where I'll just go away, I have a reality check for you: I'm not going to do it."

Faye was unusually quiet, and after a moment, ugly streaks of wet mascara began to make their way down her pale cheeks.  Spike only stood there silently, not really having anything to say to her about it, because he wasn't really sorry for what he had done, and he knew she probably didn't want to hear it anyway.

"Oh, hell," she muttered irritably, although it sounded more warbly than irritable.

"I did what I had to do, Faye," he said evenly, watching as she began to wipe fiercely at her newly raccooned eyes.  "You know that.  Maybe it was childish or whatever, but I don't really care.  It had to be done.  Shit happens."

Still, she said nothing, wiping at her eyes, attempting to get all of the black make-up smudges off her face.  She was wiping them on her white apron with no regard as to what it looked like.  Faye's only response to him was to sniffle, loudly.

He smirked, somewhat, watching the much smaller woman in front of him attempt to collect herself after her small outburst.  "You know, you really should wear waterproof mascara if you're planning on bawling during the course of a day," he admonished, still smirking lightly.

"Fuck _you_," she said without much fire, and a half-hearted little laugh.  She was still busy wiping her eyes.  Faye ignored Spike's chuckles, and, satisfied that her face was clean enough, looked up at him with as searching a gaze as she would allow herself to fix him with.  

She really wanted to just drink up the sight of the man in front of her.  After all, she never thought that she'd see him again in this world.  But that would have been awkward, strange; the fact that she just cried in front of him—_because_ of him was awkward enough.  

"So why did you come to bother me, anyway?" she asked, resigning herself to whatever he was trying to lead her into.  His face lit up and Faye could tell that she had pushed the right button.  She watched him through one splayed hand over her eyes, holding her head as if she had a headache.  In a way, she kind of did.

"I thought you'd never ask," he declared pleasantly, and wiggled his eyebrows at her.  "Wanna take a trip down Memory Lane after you get off work?" 

Later that day found Faye Valentine inside the Bebop for the first time in at least several months.  Sighing, she climbed through the hatch that led to the living room area, and stood up straight once more, snapping her umbrella closed with a spray of water.  She ran her hand through her shoulder-length hair and grumbled, looking about and seeing no one in sight.

She sauntered down to the couch and peeled off her overcoat, tossing it down, along with the key to the Redtail.  Despite the fact that she could probably make a decent sum of money off of the craft, she kept it in storage for any occasions where she might need it.  It wasn't her day-to-day vehicle anymore, though.  She'd found a little four-banger for relatively cheap to get her to and from work in the city.  A small zipcraft would have seemed just _tad_ excessive for merely going to work.

"The hell are you guys?" she called, and received no answer.  Scowling, she plopped down on the couch and turned on the telescreen with the tip of her strappy little black shoe.  Out of sheer lack of anything to do, she became offhandedly engrossed in a talk show whose daily topic was 'Interventions for Pet Owners Who _LOVE_ Their Pets!'.  It was kind of gross, actually.  _I didn't even think that they could talk about beastiality on public programming…_

_Why_ was she there?  She'd tried to be completely angry with him, she really had.  But as usual, Spike had just snubbed her anger like it was a candlewick and went right ahead with whatever he wanted to do.  It didn't matter to him that she was angry, betrayed, upset, confused, or anything.  And as usual, she had let him win, let him have his way, and instead of continuing on her enraged rant in front of the diner, she had simply stopped and given in.  She'd let herself be sucked back in with a pathetic excuse for a fight.

Fuck him, anyway.  What makes him think that I even care that he's back from the dead?  Well, I do care, but what gives him the right to use that against me?  

And furthermore, he'd told her to come to the Bebop after she'd gotten off work and he was nowhere to be had!  What a…a…cad.  _Yes, a damned dirty fucking CAD_, she screamed in her head, and mirrored the action in deed, as well.

"_Hey_!" she hollered, slapping her hand down on the couch and throwing her head back.  "I don't want to play hide and seek!  Where _are_ you guys?"

As if on cue, Spike and Jet materialized in the doorway above the couch.  She blinked up at them, quickly turning it into a scowl, and Jet merely smiled down at her.

"Hello, Faye," he said, genially enough.  "Long time no see.  Still working at the diner?"

She snorted and turned her attention back to the telescreen.  "Funny you should ask, Jet—considering I'm pretty sure that _you_ were the one who told fuckface up there where to find me!"  In response, Jet only sighed and made his way down the metal stairs, sitting in the couch's matching yellow chair at the other end of the coffee table.  Spike stayed upstairs and leaned against the railing, tapping the ash from his cigarette down onto Faye.  It scattered all over her hair and her mid-thigh length black skirt like a small snowstorm.

"Fuckface?" Spike asked, in mock hurt.  "Jeez, Faye, what'd I ever do to you?"

Faye didn't even look at him, but instead looked over to Jet with eyes that looked like they probably could have burned holes through him, if she stared long enough.  He stared back at her, evenly.

"I'm sorry, Faye.  I told him that he should have left you alone."

She closed her eyes, flopping against the armrest of the couch, propping her head up on her fist.  "Ugh, well.  Whatever.  I guess it's not your fault that _someone_ never listens to anything anyone ever tells him."  She brushed her skirt off with a flick of her wrist.  "So?  Did you tell me to come here just to be your personal ashtray, Spike?  Not much different from old times, eh?  Grinding everything out on _me_…"

A cloud of smoke descended down on her, and it prompted her to stick her free hand up into the air, palm splayed.  "If you're going to ash on me and blow smoke at me, you might as well just give me one of my own, alright, _Gorgio_?"

A second later a cigarette and a lighter were pressed into her hand with a slight linger that made her heart beat quicker.  He hadn't _meant_ to pause, of course.  It was just her brain making mountains out of molehills.  Faye lit up as Spike descended the stairs, retrieving his lighter and sitting down on the opposite side of the couch.  

"Well, number one," Spike began, raising an eyebrow at the telescreen in puzzlement, "I haven't _seen_ you in about two years, so I thought that just _maybe_ I'd pay you a visit, if that's okay with you," he said in a tone that managed to make Faye feel slightly bad, "but sorry for giving a fraction of a shit, anyway.  Number two, I have a proposition for you."

Silence befell the room and Faye ashed her cigarette habitually, until a small cluster of ashes lay on the couch cushion.  The ceiling fan did little to circulate the smoke that hung heavy in the air.  "What kind of proposition?" she asked finally, warily, refusing to look at the gaze that she knew was trained on her, waiting for a response.

"One that I can't reveal all of right now," the opposite end of the couch said.  "Only that you stand to profit immensely from it, as do all of us, if we can pull it off right."

Faye looked to Jet, who shrugged with a 'don't ask me' look.  "He said just about the same thing to me.  I have no idea.  Apparently Mr. Big Planner here isn't going to tell us anything much about it until the 'right time' comes."

"Oh, _super_," Faye gushed theatrically, exhaling a stream of smoke.  Her head was killing her—maybe because half of her brain was operating normally, and the other half was insistently concentrated on the entity and presence on the opposite end of the couch.  Every little noise he made, every little shift, even his distinct _scent_ was not evading her brain.  Faintly, she felt like crying again, although it wouldn't do anything.  Spike would treat her like the distant comrade she was, and probably turn his head or something to leave her a little dignity, and Jet would probably get up and offer her a tissue, awkwardly comforting.

God, she didn't want _anything_ to do with this life anymore.  But then at the same time, it was all she could think about.  She wanted to be near _him_ again, damn her.

"Bounties?" she asked, in monotone.  Spike made a little hrrm noise in his throat.

"Yeah, mildly," he murmured, and then threw another cigarette at her, prompting her to look at the one she held.  It had almost burned to the filter, and she threw it down on the ground, placing the new one in her mouth.  Spike slid the lighter over to her and she lit the second one, sliding the lighter back.  "Surely you don't like your little waitressing job _that_ much, do ya, Faye?"

She sighed.  "It keeps me in the eats.  And my cat, too."

"Whoa, whoa. _Cat_?  You turned into one of those crazy cat ladies already, Faye?"  Spike snickered about that to himself for a moment, although Faye did notice that Jet wore a small smile as well.  She almost snarled something, but bit her tongue and denied Spike the satisfaction of getting a rise out of her.  "What kind of money are we talking about here, oh man with the plan?  Knowing anything that _your_ head could concoct, I might as well just keep my day job."

"Millions.  _Hundreds_ of millions," Spike replied, and Jet's head snapped over to look at the other man, intently.  Spike cast his gaze lazily to Jet's and shrugged.  "What?"

"You neglected to mention the amount of money last night," Jet said.  "How the hell are we going to get that much from _bounties?_" he asked, suspiciously.  

"Don't worry your pretty little head about it," Spike said in amusement, and then looked back to the telescreen.  "Good Lord, Faye, what on God's-no-longer-green Earth are you watching?"  At the moment, a man on the screen was forcibly being separated from a large, shaggy looking mutt.  The crowd was cheering and hooting.  

Faye shook her head and ran her hand through her hair again.  "I don't know.  I just turned it on when I came in and had to wait for you two to finish your little gay tryst, or whatever the hell you were doing."

Jet twitched.  "Hey now, I resent the gay tryst remark."

Spike cast a particularly catty smirk at Jet and winked.  "You weren't complaining twenty minutes ago," he teased, and Faye giggled.  Jet looked between the two of them and growled, drumming his fingers on his knee.  

"I swear," he muttered darkly.  "You two are just as bad as one another.  Acting your shoes sizes instead of your ages…"


	2. Everything In Its Right Place

First off, I guess I'd just like to say for the record that I believe that Spike really _did_ die at the end of the series (sadly 'nuff).  But, seeing as I just couldn't live with the fact that poor Spike finally up and died, I decided to go against the laws of all that was good and holy and _intended_ and write a post-Bebop sessions fic, in which Spike is miraculously alive.  (Don't ask me quite how he survived, I'll make something mildly convincing up.)  

Also, I always was a quiet fan of a Spike/Faye relationship.  Yeah, once again, I am going to go against all that is good and holy and intended.  Although, I can say this isn't going to be one of those fics where they suddenly declare their adamant undying love for one another in little more than a paragraph.  See, I'm a fan of a Spike/Faye relationship…but only on certain grounds.  I believe that if Spike had never up and died, and eventually things were to continue the way they had been going…eventually, he and Faye probably would have come to some sort of understanding about the way they could have felt about each other (well, the way Faye _did_ feel about him, and the way he could have come to feel about her).  Okay, does all of that make any sense?  Whatever.  I'm just going to quit yakking and move on to the damn story now…

Jet couldn't _believe_ this shit.  It wasn't like he'd been resting on his laurels for the last two years or anything—matter of fact, it'd been pretty much business as usual, tracking down bounties and keeping the Bebop from completely falling apart.  Sometimes he had enough money left over to feed himself decently, and _sometimes_—but only sometimes—he even had the money to take a few extended fishing trips.  That was what the Bebop had been made for, in the first place.

Life sure as hell had been a lot easier with just himself to worry about.  Yeah, sure, it got kind of lonely at times, but he knew where Ed and Faye were, should he choose to contact them; which he did every once in a while just to make sure they were still alive and in a state of semi-normalcy.  Although normalcy was not usually a state he would associate with those two women…

The day had started out just like any other.  He'd woken up, fixed himself some breakfast (he'd recently had a quite sizable bounty, so breakfast was made from actual _breakfast_ foods), and then gone out on the Bebop's deck to admire the day.  It was a gorgeous artificial spring day on Mars.  The Bebop was sitting in the harbour in Tharsis City, where she had been floating for the last two or three days.  Jet was feeling slightly lazy.  It was nice to just _relax_ after nabbing a bounty.

He'd gone inside, given his bonsais a light sprinkling of water, and then out of sheer boredom, sat down and flipped on the telescreen to watch some stuff that was undoubtedly going to rot his brain out.  (There was _never_ anything good on mid-morning television.)  Next thing he knew, he must have dozed off, because he woke up and he had that strange disoriented feeling that one gets after they've taken a nap in the middle of the day.  Jet had pulled himself up off the hideously yellow couch and ambled back out onto the Bebop's outdoor deck, to gaze about Tharsis' harbour.

Hell, wasn't like he had anything better to do.  But he wouldn't have it any other way.  

Jet was sitting in a small folding chair on the deck, pondering going inside to prepare himself a tuna-fish sandwich when the slight whining of jet engines above the Bebop made him shield his eyes from the sun and squint upwards.

The whining was getting louder.  The craft was obviously planning on landing on _his_ damned ship, since there were no other ships about with sufficient landing space.  He scowled and continued to squint, wondering if maybe he had forgotten a planned visit from Ed or Faye, or maybe if he was getting some sort of special delivery mail or some such other bullshit.

The ship did look awfully familiar, though.  He was _positive_ he'd seen that strangely reddish-pink colour of paintjob before…  

The ex-ISSP cop had stood up so quickly that he'd almost knocked over his flimsy little folding chair, and he was entirely sure that he'd broken out into a cold sweat.  Damn him if it wasn't the _Swordfish_ landing on the Bebop—or perhaps his eyes were just playing tricks on him.  He _had_ been hanging out by himself an awful lot lately.  _Dead men don't fly ships.  They certainly don't fly ships back to visit their old bounty-hunter buddies, Jet_, he chided himself.  Overactive imagination, that had to be it.

Jet thought his too-young-to-die thirty-eight year old heart was going to rupture a valve when the weathered craft finally set itself down on the deck. The sun-shield tint on the glass dimmed, and after the engines had gone into power-down mode, the hatch hissed and popped open, revealing a man that had managed to conveniently evade death—_yet again_.

Jet blinked, rapidly.  Perhaps the eggs he'd eaten this morning were bad.  Or perhaps he never had woken up from that nap on the couch and this was a dream.

"Before," the dead man began, standing in his craft and beginning to work his hands out of his all-too-familiar flight gloves, "before you go breaking out crucifixes and calling in priests to perform exorcisms, I think you should just stand there and be quiet while I explain some things to you, Jet."

He didn't have to be told twice.  Jet didn't think his voice was working at the moment, anyway.

That had been a little over two hours ago.  The beautiful day had stretched into the lazy golden glow of the afternoon, and still—Jet could not believe this shit.  Boom.  Just like that, Spike Spiegel had waltzed back into his life, seemingly from the dead.

Whatever faint sense of normalcy in life that Jet himself had been working for was effectively shot completely to shit.  There was a dead man sitting on his couch like he had never left, throwing his feet up on the disgustingly modern coffee table with just as little respect as he had always had for it.

"So I guess the _obvious _question would be why didn't you come back right after you got out of the hospital?" Jet asked in a semi-irate, semi-shocked tone, lurking in the doorway to the living room area.  "Why come back _now_, after two frickin' years?"

Spike snickered, and Jet almost lost his temper.  Almost.  Snickering, to him, seemed to be a highly inappropriate response, considering the circumstances.  "You've asked me that one _three_ times now, Jet."  Spike rubbed lazily at his nose and slouched further into the couch, evidently more than ready for a siesta.  "Are you _really_ that shocked that I'm still alive?  I mean, c'mon.  It is me, after all."

Jet scowled.  "Yes, I'm that damn shocked!  Official reports claimed that there had been no survivors at the scene of the headquarters.  I had some of my ISSP buddies lend us a bit of a hand in trying to piece together exactly what had happened, and the most we got out of it was that when the cops showed up, the building was collapsing on itself, there were dead bastards _everywhere_, and the Red Dragon Syndicate was more or less officially dead."  Jet chewed his lip a bit, and wondered whether or not he should add the next part.  He sighed, and continued.  "A bit more digging turned up some more dead bodies on the other side of Tharsis City—yer friend Annie, some kids whose names I don't remember, and…"

Spike's face still had a strangely sarcastic smile on it.  "…Julia?  Lying on the rooftop?  I know.  It's okay.  You can say it.  My head isn't going to explode or anything."

The older man shrugged, but silently decided to bring it up as little as possible in the future.  What Spike said and what Spike acted were two completely different things, Jet knew.  "Well, anyway—we never got a straight answer out of anyone besides the same line over and over again—no survivors."

"Well, gee, Jet, I'm _hurt_ that you never figured better.  After all, weren't you a tad suspicious when your ISSP pals couldn't hook you up with my dead body?"  Spike seemed a bit smug at how well he had inadvertently orchestrated his own death—_again._

Jet grunted.  "Didn't figure you _had_ much of a body left, what with the shape they found Vicious in, and what the building looked like…"  

Spike stretched, yawned, and cracked his fingers behind his head; evidently, he was gearing up for an eventual nap.  _Like the goddamned punk never left,_ Jet groused mentally.  "Well, whatever.  I suppose I'll answer your question again, since you seem so fascinated by it.  Seems the White Tiger Syndicate was so enthused at my decision to almost single-handedly take out their rivals, that they showed up on the scene not long after I passed out on the stairs, I'm guessing.  Next thing I know, I wake up in a hospital with a couple of White Tiger guys standing around me, telling me I'm lucky to have survived, blah blah blah…"

"Uh-huh," Jet interjected, making it clear that he got _this_ part of the story.

"Apparently, they saved my ass because _they_ wanted to try to get in on this, too."  Spike proudly jerked the lapels of his suit; one that bore a faint resemblance to his old one, but was obviously newer and in better shape, and in different colours.  "I, uh…kind of refused.  I mean, there I was, lying in a bed, bandaged from here to there and they were asking me to join a Syndicate again?  R_iiiight_.  Thankfully they were a lot more lenient with me than they probably would have been with your average schmoe…I think they were so overjoyed that I had killed all the Dragons and then wanted out _completely_ that they were just kind of content to let me be."  The lanky man shrugged, fussing in his suit jacket for a cigarette, produced one, and lit it with little less than overly-theatrical flare.  In the cloud of dense smoke that followed, he paused dramatically.

"_However_, they claimed that what they'd done for me couldn't go without some kind of payment.  My hospital debts were…delicately put, they were a fuckload.  I had to work for them, at least for a while.  Mostly just some bullshit recon crap they had me do because, after all, I am a master of stealth.  So I was busy with that for quite some time, and finally, I got my debts paid off, they struck my name from the records, I shook hands and was all polite-like, and then I split."

Jet's eyebrow twitched.  "And then?"

"Then I got bored and decided to come find _you_."  Spiegel laughed, carelessly ashing his cigarette on the metal floor of the Bebop, causing Jet's eyebrow to twitch some more.  "Cheer up!  You should be glad I'm here, old man.  Looks like you need some spice in your life, here.  I'm just the thing for it!"  Spike winked at Jet, who sighed and put his face in his hands, still obviously shaken by the whole situation.  

_Who wouldn't be_? He asked himself.  _He's supposed to be DEAD!_  "When did you get so damned egomaniacal?" the large man asked of the ghost sitting on his couch, looking tired already.

The ghost favoured the older man with slow smirk.  "Cheating death will do that to a man."

The couch.  The yellow couch.  The vinyl yellow couch.  It was a testament as to why living room furniture should never be made out of vinyl—he'd slept on it enough times to be able to write a thesis paper on it, for Christ's sake.  There wasn't anything quite like waking up in the morning and finding your bare skin stuck to the fake-leather surface.  The agony of having to peel yourself from the surface after a moment of realization was quite exquisite, as well.  

Strangely enough, he'd kind of missed peeling himself off that couch every morning (well, late afternoon, but what the hell).  Spike tossed his black jacket onto the coffee table and kicked off his shoes, flopping backwards and exhaling sharply.  Some of his hair ruffled up, and then came to rest on his forehead again.  Unconsciously, he rubbed his face a bit and realized he needed a good shave.  Bah, whatever.  There was always tomorrow.

Over the last two years the formerly dead man had found himself thinking precisely that thought more and more.  _There's always tomorrow_.  That was something that he never would have thought two years ago.  Back then he seemed to be waiting for everything to hurry up and end so he could start over again.  Start over again with Julia, buy a dog, get a house with a lawn, and maybe—just fucking _maybe_ consider having some kids.  Hell, if he was willing to go as far to get a dog, kids weren't much different, were they?  He'd often wondered back then what he would do for a job when he finally began his normal life.  He always thought he'd make a good journalist, or maybe a novelist.  Maybe a musician on the side, start playing the trumpet or something weird like that.   

His hopes for normal life had died along with Julia on that rooftop, blood dribbling out of her mouth as she looked up at him, lithe fingers clutching at his sleeves, silently willing him to make her life last a little longer.  After all, Spike was certain that Julia knew as well as he did that his life was worth jack shit without her.

That hadn't mattered.  Julia died, the last little bits of her precious, fucked-up life spluttering out on that rainy, blood-soaked rooftop while he stood there like a tool, helpless.  

And then blah blah blah, depression, withdrawl, anger—what the hell were those steps again, the ones that people went through when dealing with grief?  Spike was pretty sure that there were five of them, or something.  His hand rubbed his eyes, and he decided to let it drop.  Yeah, admittedly, he'd gone through some pretty rough times right after he'd woken up in the hospital, and there'd been a couple of times he himself wasn't sure at all if he'd make it through the night, the urge to just end it all was so strong.  After a while, though, shockingly… the pain started to fade.  Life started to be at least halfway-tolerable again, and it was then that he realized that Julia or no, he enjoyed living for the sheer act of it.  It wasn't half bad, this whole life thing.  The acceptance of the Julia or no part of the deal took him a bit longer than everything else, but eventually after quite a few drunken epiphanies (during one of which he was vehemently sure that he had actually communicated with Julia herself), he started to let her go, slowly but surely.

Sure, he still loved her.  God _damn _he still loved her.  He was quite possibly the closest case to physical necrophilia that had ever existed, but… he wasn't _living_ for her, anymore.

At twenty-nine, Spike Spiegel was starting to get a little living in for himself.  It was kind of fun.  At times it was little more than educational and full of hassles, but for the most part, it was kind of…novel.  Life.  _Ain't it grand_, his brain cracked.

"Hey _Jet_," Spike hollered, knowing the other man was about somewhere on the Bebop.  If he just lay there and hollered for long enough, he knew eventually the other man would respond.  "Hey _JET!_"

"_What?!_" came the agitated reply from the distance.  The sound of heavy-footed clomping was heard, and then Jet was standing in the doorway, wearing a pair of reading spectacles.  Spike resisted the urge to comment, but couldn't manage to keep the look of mirth off his face—which was, to his dismay, starting to reveal some signs of his age.  There were a few more lines around his eyes and his mouth than had been there only a few months ago.  He was almost _thirty_, after all.

"So whaddya wanna do?" Spike asked, sounding non-plussed.  Jet rolled his eyes, and removed his glasses to glare half-heartedly at Spike.  The receiver of the glare didn't seem to notice it, therefore reducing its power to nil.

"You called me out here just to ask me that?"  Jet shrugged, and actually smiled for the first time since Spike had landed.  "Well, hell.  I don't know.  I didn't figure you'd want to be so active so quickly, having been _dead_ and all," he jested, to which Spike rolled his eyes.  "Whatever.  I'm an old man, Spike.  I don't do much of anything anymore."

"Aw, shucks," tsked the man on the couch.  He propped himself up some so he could better see Jet.  "Well, what can we 'old men'," Spike actually emphasized the 'old men' part with quotation marks made with his fingers, "do together?  I'm not as young as I used to be, either, buddy.  I'm pushin' thirty, here.  After thirty, life's as good as over—well, so I hear, anyway."

"Watch it, kid," Jet snapped in mock agitation.  "I've been after thirty for a while."

"Obla di, obla da, oh oh oh and life goes on."  Spike swung himself around into a sitting position with such ease and grace that it was plain to see that the previous old man jokes had been simple jest.  "So let's celebrate our longevity and go out.  I know of a couple nice bars in good ole Tharsis that I don't have to worry about being spotted at anymore."  He caught Jet's 'I'm Not Too Sure About That' look, and offered him a wide smile, spreading his hands.  "Hey, look, it'll be on me.  I got the dough if you don't.  Bebop still sucking up money like old times?"

Jet shook his head slowly, wondering how Spike had managed to convince him with so little of a fight.  "Yeah," he muttered, half to himself and half to the man grinning in front of him.  "_Just_ like old times."

Jet was feeling pretty damn good.  He was about six or seven beers deep, and Spike had been drinking whisky sours like they were water.  It was starting to become blatantly evident that before the night was over Spike was going to probably have some problems walking, talking, or even _remembering_ doing either.

Jet shrugged and took another swig of his beer, admitting to himself that it _was_ a decent bar, decorated in a subtly classy way that reminded him of some sort of bar that you would see in a sitcom on TV.  The stained-glass light fixtures, the polished bar, the friendly and attentive barkeep, the small but lively crowd who associated like they were all old friends.  Yeah, it was all in place.

"Y'know," Spike mumbled, cigarette stuck between his lips, eyes squinted to avoid getting the smoke in them, "I used to be a pretty mean shot.  In pool, that is," he added as an afterthought, and indeed, he was holding a pool cue, sharpening the end with the little chalk block.  "Whaddya say, Jet?  Play me a game?  Or are you too drunk to perform?" he asked with a snicker and a sway, and he slammed the chalk down on the corner of the table.  He took the cigarette out of his mouth and grabbed his drink with the same hand while Jet gave a little 'what the hell' face and started reaching into the pockets and tossing the balls out onto the table.  

"You break or I break?" Jet asked, tossing the thirteen ball up and down in his metal hand.  Spike wiggled his eyebrows and took a drink.

"Ooh, lucky number thirteen," he commented, and then nodded at Jet.  "I'm breaking."

"You got it."  The metal hand set the thirteen down and grabbed the rack, rolling all the balls into place.  He rolled the cue ball down the table at Spike, who stilled it with a long index finger and set his drink down.  Jet grabbed his own cue (and narrowly avoided knocking a few more down), and watched as the other man geared up to make his break, his cigarette dropping a few errant ashes onto the green fabric of the table.

Spike looked like he was pouring his whole being into the shot.  Jet noticed him studying the shot critically with his false eye—briefly, Jet wondered if the eye had some sort of weird calculating device that would make it easier for Spike to thoroughly school him.  Jet had never been much good at billiards, anyway.

"So," he said, lighting up a cigarette of his own, "what're you going to do now, Spike?"

The ceaseless movement of the cue stopped, and Spike blinked, his concentration broken.  "God damn it, I'm trying to make a shot here," he growled, and then wrinkled his nose.  "What's it matter?"

Jet could have hauled across the floor and smacked the kid then, after that comment; although he was quite sure that Spike would have been drunk enough to smack back.  He sputtered a bit, and frowned deeply when the shot was finally made and at least three or four different balls went sailing into pockets.  "What does it _matter_?" he asked, irately.  "You just suddenly show up out of the blue, 'Hey, I'm not dead', and then you're just going to disappear again?  Why even come back at _all_, then?"

Spike sharpened his cue again and sniffed as the dust got into his nose.  "I'm stripes," he replied, as if it were viable answer to the question, and then waved his hand at Jet.  "Oh yeah, oh yeah.  Aw, Jet…are you asking me to marry you?  I mean, 'cause you might as well, 'cause you're acting kind of…wife-ish right now."

Jet told himself that the lack of caring for his feelings on Spike's part was due to the inebriation.  "Damnit, seriously.  I'm asking because whether or not you know it, you disrupted my life rather nicely today, and I'm just wondering if you had a reason for it, or if you just did it for shits and giggles. Also, I'm kind of curious as to what you're going to do now that you're not indebted to the White Tigers anymore."

Spike was oddly silent, and then simply took his next shot, knocking in another striped ball.  His thin lips were somewhat puckered, as if he were pondering his next words, and then finally, he spoke.  "I've got some plans.  I caught wind of a few things.  But we have to wait."  Yet another striped ball fell.  "I'll let you know what's up when the time is right.  You might not like it, but I've given it a lot of thought.  If we play our cards right, we might not ever have to make any plans, ever again."

Jet blinked.  _What the hell is he talking about?_  Now he was curious, and whatever inclination to play pool that he might have had vanished like a vapour.  "Explain."

"I can't.  Not now, anyway.  I can tell you right now that you probably won't go along with it at all," Spike admitted, pensive, "but I know people who will.  Rather, a person.  And until then…I guess you're stuck with me."  He paused.  "Yeah, I'll hang around for a while.  But sure as shit when I tell you my plans you might kick me out on my ass."

Spike took another drink, seemingly relishing Jet's utter confusion and suspicion.  Then, on second thought, he finished the sour off.  Slamming the glass down on the corner of the pool table hard, he looked across at Jet through the smoky air and the glow of the overhead light.  "If we do it, we're going to need help."

"Of what kind?" Jet asked, quirking an eyebrow upward.

"The inherently dishonest kind," Spike said, a smirk creeping across the lower half of his face.  "The Faye Valentine kind."

Jet put his face in his hands, moaning.  "Oh, Jesus H.  Next you'll be telling me you wanna track _Edward_ down, too."  He lifted his hand from his face to look over and Spike and there was silence.  The look on Spike's face said it all.  "Oh.  _Oh.  _You're not serious, are you?"

Spike stalked around the pool table, indicating it with the end of his cue.  "You'd better make a move.  Go ahead.  I'll give you a sporting chance before I go ahead and win.  But I'll tell you this much."  He swung the pool cue around to point it at Jet's face, coming within a dangerous distance of swiping Jet's nose with the end of it.  

Spike stared down it like it was the barrel of his Jericho.  "We wait for a bounty.  Not just any bounty—the right kind of bounty.  It should be coming up soon, if my sources are correct—the little fuckers, they'd _better_ be right."

Jet eased himself away from cue-point and sidled up to the table.  "Well, whatever.  I'm not gonna say anything about your little 'plan'.  I think it might just be the whisky talking.  I'm going to humour the dead guy."


	3. a sorta fairytale

I know, I know… the story is ridiculously slow moving.  I'll get to some interesting stuff, eventually.  But for now it's just me futzing around with the characters because I like to do that kind of crap.  **(shameless plug) ** Everyone review, review, review.  I want to know if there are people even reading this or if I should just fucking forget it ^_^

_Damn him, damn him, damn him_.  Faye was sitting in the little folding chair on the outside deck that she had found out there, staring out at the rain-clouded night sky and scowling.  She knew it was too late for her, too late to back out of this now.  She knew that she _should_ have started screaming in the diner like she'd said she would have, she knew that she should have spat in his face when he asked her to come to the Bebop after she got off work.  She shouldn't have told her co-workers that he really was an old friend, and she knew damn well that she should have never come to the Bebop at all.

But there she was after all, lazing around on the ship like she'd never left.  And it wasn't even the lure of the money that Spike's mysterious plan could get her that made her stay.  It was the mysterious plan-maker _himself_.

"Hey Faye," he'd bubbled earlier, flopping over on the couch, wiggling his thumb at her.  "Wanna have a thumb war?"

She'd looked at him like he was insane, and blinked.  "A _what_?"

He continued to wiggle his thumb in persistence.  "C'mon, I'm bored as fuck.  Jet'll kick my ass—he's got a metal arm, for crying out loud.  Thumb wrestle me."

"Fine, whatever."  She'd jabbed her hand into his, ignoring the way her heartstrings pulled and her stomach lurched, and gone through the rites of the pre-thumb war chant like she wasn't at all bothered that his hand dwarfed hers, pretended that the heat coming from his strong fingers wasn't making her whole arm tingle…

Of course he'd won.  His thumb was a lot bigger and stronger than hers, and in about point three seconds he'd nailed her thumb to her own hand and held it there for a few seconds before batting her hand away in gleeful victory.

"Man, you suck at that," he muttered, before leaning back to the other side of the couch, still wiggling his thumb about.  It looked as if he was practicing Jeet Kun Do moves with it.

And there she was, hours later, still obsessing over the moment their hands had touched for longer than a millisecond with a kind of schoolgirl nervousness.  God, she hated herself.  No matter how many times she'd tried to tell herself that Spike couldn't give two shits about her while on a prescription strength enema, the lingering little hopes kept coming back.  

She wanted him.  It was a simple as that; she wasn't used to not being able to have what she wanted.  Her brain just couldn't get over it.  More like her _heart_ just couldn't get over it.  

Faye had kind of gotten used to her mild-mannered little life, and then _he_ had to come in and tear it all to bits.  She was like any other twenty-five year old—well, besides the whole nasty frozen-for-years bit—she'd gone out on her own, got an apartment, she paid for cable television, she bought Tupperware and boxed cereals, put gas in her car, and even bought a _cat_ to keep her company, for Christ's sake.  She went out with the girls from work, sometimes, and even got drunk enough to sing karaoke with them sometimes.

Faye had even tried her hand at dating once, twice.  She'd given up on it, disgusted at herself that she kept looking for little things in the poor guys that would remind her of _Spike_.  _Spike_, of all people.  Spike was the kind of guy that she couldn't ever bring home to her parents, if she still had them at all, that was.  There were good qualities about him; some that he tried to keep more hidden than others, but on the whole he was just the Wrong Kind of Guy.  He was the bad boy type that all girls stupidly fell for and ended up crying over, just like she herself had.  Spike was just so…so…_impractical.  _Spike was like a racy red sports car convertible when all you needed was a four-door sedan.  Spike was like the gigantic home-theatre system when all you needed was a thirteen inch black and white TV.  Spike was like the triple-shot latte with vanilla flavouring and extra whipped cream when all you _really_ needed was just a glass of water.

Spike was the pretty, pretty thing that you wanted but knew that you shouldn't get.

Faye sighed.  Her self control always _had_ been so weak when it came to things like that.  At that moment, she found her lusting had switched briefly from Spike to a triple-shot latte with vanilla flavouring and extra whipped cream.  Her stomach brumbled.

"Hungry much?" the man of her musings cracked, having come up out of nowhere.  Faye guessed that, oh-so-cliched as it was, she'd been so wrapped up in her own thoughts that she hadn't heard him approach.  He settled himself down on the deck next to the folding chair, endless legs stretched out in front of him and his comparably endless arms behind him propping him up.  A light breeze ruffled his already much-ruffled hair.  "I'm starving too.  I was thinking about ordering a pizza.  Well, Jet and I decided to go ahead and do it, I guess I should say.  Should be coming within thirty minutes.  Or," he said, holding up one finger for emphasis, "we get it for _free_.  Hot diggity."

"Can we be serious here for just a minute?" she asked abruptly, remembering that Spike was always more likely to treat her like a human being and level with her if she caught him off guard.  It was like he was secretly awed at her ability to catch him unaware, and decided to reward her by acting like she was anybody else and _not_ the shrew woman.

"'Bout what?" he asked calmly, and Faye took that as a sign that he had been effectively caught off guard by the lack of snap in his response.  

She sighed, uncrossing her legs and setting her foot down on the deck with a delicate _click_ of her heel.  "Did you really give a fuck about how Jet and I felt after these two years, or did you just come back because you needed our help?"  She was almost afraid of his answer, because if nothing else, Spike had a tendency to be brutally honest.

He laughed, the wonderfully powerful deep thing that she had remembered it to be.  "Sometimes I think you take me for a bigger monster than I really am," he mused, a lilt in his voice.  "It's both, I suppose.  More of the wondering what you were up to, though, probably, because I could more than likely pull off my plan by myself.  Just thought it would be nice to give kind of a 'Hey, Heads up, I Ain't Dead' kind of visit, no matter what happened."

"How considerate of you," she said dryly, "to take time out of your busy schedule to remember those who you'd left behind."

"I was busy," he replied simply, his wide shoulders moving up and down quickly.  "I owed a Syndicate.  It wasn't like I could just up and ditch out on them, lest I find myself in another Red Dragon-type situation.  Besides, looks like you guys were busy, too."

Faye gripped the white plastic arm of the chair, cracking her ring finger nail with the pressure.  "Yeah, busy being worried _fucking_ sick, Spike!  You could have at least called us, or something.  We were busy putting our lives back together, is what we were busy with."

"Faye," he said patiently, but not entirely unkindly, "you, in a takes-one-to-know-one kind of manner, should know that I am like a stray cat.  I come, I eat your food for a while, I sleep on your couch, and then I'm gone.  Honestly, I hate to say it, but you all should have _known_ better than to get that attached to me.  _You_, especially."

And then again, she was crying, little rivers running down her cheeks.  However, this time she had actually followed his advice and worn waterproof mascara, so her makeup was not mussing.  Faye didn't know whether or not he had noticed the new development in their conversation yet.  She couldn't get herself to stop, partially because she was afraid.  She felt that somehow he knew that she was wildly, crazily in love with him and he was, in his own way, telling her that she was fucking nuts.  

"Oh, well, 'scuse _us_ for caring," she muttered miserably, and then she felt his gaze on her, whereas she had not felt it before.  _Now_ he noticed the newest development in their conversation, if he hadn't before.  She ignored his gaze.  "You can't tell me that you didn't become somewhat attached to us, as well."

"I already told you that I'm not sorry for what I did," he said in that same patient tone.  It was making her nuts.  Faye couldn't tell if he was trying to be gentle or if he was trying to be patronizing.  "Yeah, the Bebop was home to my screwed up little family, but not even you guys could have an impact on what _needed_ to be done in my life.  Maybe I'm somewhat sorry that it all turned out so shittily, but I'm not sorry for leaving.  I needed to close the book on that part of my life, whether or not it fit into you guys' emotional plan for life or not."  He reached out and gave the side of her bare calf a little slap with the back of his hand, sitting up some.  "Hey.  What happened to that tough-as-nails Faye Valentine I remember, huh now?  She wouldn't let the past actions of some stupid _lunkhead_ make her cry."

Faye finally looked down at him, and found him to be smiling faintly, giving her a look that she imagined a big brother would give his little sister who had fallen down and scraped her knee.  It almost made her want to cry more.  She sniffled at him pathetically, at a loss for words at finding herself in front of him in tears for the second time in one day.  She didn't even recall ever crying in front of him, _ever_ before.

"C'mon, buck up, Romany," he said, in a soft, friendly tone.  "Stop crying.  Believe it or not, I _do_ remember that you are a girl…and believe it or not, even the consciences of heartless monsters like me don't like to have girls crying in front of them."  He grinned suddenly, and rolled his eyes, shaking his head.  "Christ, listen to me—I'm attempting to console the _shrew_.  Whatever.  What're you crying for?  I ain't dead, after all."

"Are you sure you weren't sent back to the world of the living to atone for your sins or something?" she managed finally, giving him a weak smirk through her teary façade.  "You're being _awfully_ damned nice for the regular old Spike Spiegel."

He shrugged and stood up suddenly, stretching, and then reaching into his inside breast pocket, pulling out a handkerchief.  "Like I said," holding the white square of cloth out to her, casually, "sometimes I think you take me for a bigger monster than I really am.  Not that I'm _not _a monster," he amended, just as casually, as Faye tentatively took the handkerchief and dried her eyes with it, carefully trying not to get makeup all over it.  "I'm kind of like a demi-monster, not the giant hulking thing with fangs under the bed that you perceive me to be."  He waved the handkerchief off flippantly when she tried to hand it back to him.  "Keep it.  I got a shitload of 'em, just so I can be the token guy who hands 'em to broads when they start bawling.  So typically me, eh?"

"Broads?" Faye asked, flatly.  "You ass."

Spike was staring at a small zipcraft making its way towards the Bebop, it's night spotlight on, streaking over the calm black waters of the harbour.  "Pizza's here," he muttered, a slight hint of disappointment in his voice.  "Damnit.  Guess it's not free."

The zipcraft landed on the Bebop's landing deck, and the pizza guy hopped out as Spike walked over to meet him, handed him a few wulongs, and then took off again as Spike walked back to Faye with a monstrous pizza box in hand and that same big-brother smile on his face.

"We got the massively excessive size because we accounted for your un-ladylike appetite as well," he explained teasingly, indicating the box.  "Jet's half's got everything on it, and my half's got pineapple and jalapenos—you can take your pick.  You gonna come eat or are you gonna sit out here and cry like a baby all night?"

Faye didn't know whether she should slap him flush in the face or hug him—if it wouldn't have made the situation even more awkward than it already was, that is.  She settled for standing and putting her hands on her hips, not returning his smile but staring back at him, evenly.  "Thanks for taking that seriously, I guess.  …I didn't figure you would.  Either that or you would probably just blow up at me, or something."

Spike laughed at her then, raising an eyebrow at her like she was the weirdest thing in the world.  "You annoy the fuck out of me, Faye, but you seem to have my feelings towards you blown _entirely_ out of proportion.  Whatever.  I'm not going to sit here and argue with you as to whether or not I regard you as a _human being_ while I'm holding a delicious pizza in my hands.  I'm going to go inside and eat, and you can come along if you please."  He laughed again, and then dropped his voice an octave, or so it seemed and grew serious while still smiling, if that was even possible.

For Spike Spiegel, it was, she knew.  He often hid behind smiles.

"Jesus, Faye, why don't you just stop trying to figure it out, already?  Stop worrying about it and _let it be_."  He walked past her, still smiling, and headed for the hatch of the Bebop.  She stood rooted to her spot, confused but not really confused by his last words, staring out at the black waters of the harbour.

"Coming or not?" he called from the hatch, pausing until she turned around and made her way towards him, at which point he opened the hatch and went in, but left it open for her behind him.

"Figure _what_ out?" Faye muttered to herself as she came in and closed the hatch, her stomach growling at the scent of pizza that lingered in the hallway in Spike's wake.  "Let _what_ be?"  She pulled the locking mechanism to and sighed heavily, shutting her eyes briefly and making her way down the hallway.  "As if we both didn't know perfectly well already what it is."     


	4. Anyway

I like lots of boring character development.  Sorry if it's too slow-moving for some people, but I like characters to have an indecent amount of whatever-time before I launch into the actual story itself.  Anyway, sorry.  Getting on with it. "So here we are 

_Stuck in Hell, same old game_

_We know it well_

_I don't mind_

Anyway" 

--Dynamite Hack, "Anyway"

Every day, diligently, Spike had been checking the 'net and other such sources for the right time to reveal his plan.  It'd been a week and nothing had been forthcoming yet.

It was starting to make him somewhat nervous.  The more he thought about his plan and how delicate and precise everything would have to be in order for it to work, the more he started to think that it probably wouldn't work at _all._  The longer he waited for the right situation, the more nerve he knew he would lose.  

If the right situation didn't hurry up and present itself, he had a feeling that he was going to end up saying 'Fuck it' and simply forget about it.  

He stared blankly at the pair of clippers in his hand, and even more blankly at the small bonsai tree on the coffee table.  Jet had thought it would be a grand idea to make a present of the tree to Spike, commenting that he was 'tired of the bitching and moaning every day about being bored'.  So far, Spike had been sitting there for ten minutes with the clippers, wondering if he should even try to prune it at _all.  _Wasn't one supposed to wait for it to grow for a while before snipping it?  He'd only had it for all of ten minutes and there he was, all ready to hack away at it.  

He pondered, briefly, snipping it into the shape of a gun or a car or something, but then figured that Jet would probably stab him with the trimmers if he were to see how Spike had defiled the precious little plant.  In agitation, Spike reached out and chopped off one innocent little branch, and then threw the trimmers down on the table.  

_This is what boredom does to a man,_ he thought, bitterly.  _It drives him to abuse foliage and ponder robbing mints._

That _was_ his plan, after all.  Spike considered himself a pretty honest, upright kind of guy—well, mostly, anyway.  He didn't believe in hitting women or kids, and he didn't believe in the little man being trampled on.  He brought criminals to justice as a bounty hunter, even though he himself had once been a criminal.  He liked to think that the larger part of his reason for bounty hunting was the satisfaction of it, but when he _really_ thought about it, the larger part was actually the money.  He'd been chasing bounties around for long enough, and sometimes, he didn't even catch them.  Sometimes they got away with whatever they were doing and left him in an even _worse_ position than he had been in to begin with.  However, every once in a while (more often than Spike would have liked to admit), that whole nagging _conscience_ thing drove him to do what he believed was inherently right.

So why not beat the bounties at their own game?  While working for the White Tigers, he'd been on a mission on Venus, infiltrating a rival syndicate's puppet corporation or some such bullshit when he caught wind of some upcoming top secret heists that were supposedly going to be happening in the next couple of months.  Apparently, a small faction of the other syndicate's members had broken off into their own little band, and had been evading the syndicate for months.  They hadn't been able to keep their plans away from the eyes of the syndicate entirely, though, and as a result, it was somewhat common knowledge that these bozos—who called themselves the _Sombras_ (_some _language's word for 'Shadows') were planning a string of pinches on the various government mints on at least three or four planets.  

But there was the catch that had caught Spike.  Word of these rumoured events still hadn't caught the ISSP's ears, and as a result, the syndicate—the _Olmo Nero_ Syndicate—wanted their renegade men back before they could get caught by the ISSP and reveal a bunch of nasty secrets.  Supposedly these _Sombras_ guys were good enough to be able to pull a job of that magnitude off, but still, the syndicate was covering its ass by spreading the word around in the world of the other syndicates: Catch these guys, bring 'em to us, and we'll reward you handsomely _without_ bringing the ISSP into it.  

That was where Spike and everyone else would come into play.  Go in, catch the jerks, make off with what _they_ would have stolen, and then watch them catch the blame for it.  Alas, since the _Olmo Nero_ would probably kill them brutally for going AWOL, there wouldn't be anybody left to reveal what had actually happened, would there now?

On top of that, Spike and everyone else would also get whatever delightful reward the syndicate decided to give to them for bringing in the _Sombras_.

Spike picked up the clippers again and did some fancy jabs and slices with them, slouching back into the couch.  He considered himself a pretty honest and upright guy, but he was _tired _of getting fucked over. 

It was high time that _he_ fucked someone over.

The bonsai gift was sitting on the table still, where Jet had set it, and he frowned at seeing what had apparently been a branch at one time laying in fine mulch upon the table.  The discarded clippers lay next to the miniature pile of mulch, and Jet's eyes went from the neglected tree to Spike, who was sitting in front of the laptop, looking frustrated.

"Problem?" Jet asked, folding his arms over his chest and waiting for Spike's reply, which was not exactly snappy in the coming.

Spiegel snorted and flicked the computer screen, brow furrowed.  "I can't find any information or trails or evidence or locations or _anything_ related to Ed."

Jet neatly swept the bonsai mulch into his metal hand, and poked at it a bit, silently awed at how finely chopped up it was.  Spike must have spent about an hour to get it into that tiny of pieces.  "Ah, I see.  Looking for someone else to traumatize this week with your sudden reanimation?"  He chuckled in lieu of Spike's absent response.  "Well, you _are_ in her world, there.  You might as well just start flying from planet to planet _asking_ if anyone's seen Ed—you might have better chances at that than with finding her location on the 'net."

"Thanks for the reassuring words," Spike growled, obviously not wanting to hear the obvious.  Finding Jet and Faye had been easy; finding Ed was going to be damned near impossible.  

"My advice?" Jet said suddenly, even though the other man had _not asked for his advice, "My advice is to just wait.  Ed gets in touch with me every once in a while.  She bounces around a lot with that coot of a dad of hers, and she usually drops me a line every couple of weeks or so, just to say how's it going."  He put a hand over his eyes, groaning.  "Of course, it's usually in some colour of crayon, and is mostly gibber about Ein and a lot of smileys, but…"_

"…it's something."  Spike rolled his eyes and slapped the laptop shut, ignoring the look his treatment of the equipment earned him from Jet.  "A couple of weeks might be too long.  She's the most crucial part of the plan.  I _need Ed."  He pulled a slightly bent cigarette out of a pack hidden in the discarded jacket next to him.  "At times like this I wish I was telepathic."_

"Coming into that close of contact with Ed's brain might permanently damage yours, anyway," Jet replied in monotone.  "Sometimes I wonder what happened to that kid to make her like that.  She's running on sixteen and she's _still acting like she's five."_

"I'm running on thirty and I'm still acting like I'm five," Spike retorted, grinning.  "Although in a different way from Ed.  I wear shoes.  Ed doesn't."

Jet absent-mindedly sprinkled the bonsai mulch onto the floor of the Bebop, wiping his hands off on his pant legs when he was done, and then looked over to Spike.  "You eaten yet today?"

Spike, for his part, looked incredulous.  "Are you kidding?  Me?  Fix my own food?  Never!  Of course I haven't eaten today."  He arched his eyebrows and rubbed his hands together, devious.  "What's cookin'?"  
Jet turned away from Spike and walked up the steps, towards the hatch.  He paused with his hand on the hatch, wondering if what he was going to do was the brightest idea.  Finally he told himself 'to hell with it' and looked over at Spike.  "Y'know, that diner that Faye works at has the _best damn onion rings you'll ever eat in your lifetime."_

Spike jumped up, throwing a few quick jabs and one quick roundhouse kick at an invisible opponent, and turned to grin at Jet, still bouncing about and weaving as if he were facing off against that same invisible opponent.  "Well, what're we sitting around here for, then?  Let's jet…_Jet."  He dropped his loosely balled fists from their attack stance, and stood in the middle of the living area, blinking.  "That was the worst coincidental pun __ever.  I should be shot for that."_

"I'm too hungry to do anything about it right now," Jet replied, heading towards the hangar.  "Let's go."

The diner was actually rather dead for a Friday lunchtime, only a few tables here and there were occupied, and the waitresses had resorted to gathering around the register, blabbing until they needed to go check on their tables or until someone seated themselves in one of their sections.  

Faye had resigned herself to doodling on her order pad until she jerked her head up at the utterance of "Faye, your friends are here".  She shot a weary glance at Jet and bland, indescribable look at Spike, and made her way over to them, holding two menus.  Jet had already started to head for his usual table that he always sat in whenever he dropped in on Faye, which was usually any time he was on Mars and he could afford to eat out.  Spike followed, climbing into the booth with his back against the window and his long legs poking off the seat into the walkway.  Faye swatted at them with the menus, and then tossed said menus onto the table, favouring the two men with her best 'You've got to be kidding me' look.

"I'd like to place a complaint with the manager," Spike drawled, grabbing an ashtray from the empty booth next to their table.  "My waitress is surly."

"_Spike," Jet growled from across the table, telling him without words not to get into it with Faye today.  He kind of felt sorry for the poor woman.  He couldn't imagine what it would be like to be so completely in love with someone who was…well, __Spike.  And who treated her like utter crap most of the time.  The woman was, sometimes, too masochistic for her own good._

"Sorry, dad," Spike muttered, grabbing his menu and sticking his nose into it.  He was, for lack of a better description, pouting.

Faye gave Jet a look of thanks, and smiled at him.  "What's up, old man?  No food on the Bebop—as per usual?"

Jet shrugged, taking up his own menu and perusing it.  "Nah.  Just too lazy to cook for once."  

Faye nodded in understanding and looked from Jet to the menu with legs.  "Whadda you guys want to drink?"

"Margarita on the rocks, salt please," the menu with legs commented dryly, and Jet slammed his own menu down on the table in irritation.  

"_Spike!" he reprimanded, and the menu dropped to reveal a disgruntled Spike.  Jet widened his eyes at him as if to say 'I can't believe you', and Spike put the menu back up in front of his face with a profanity under his breath._

"Jesus, sorry, ya killjoy," he grumbled, sounding somewhat cowed.  "Okay.  _Fine.  Just a cup of coffee, if it's not too much of a hassle to Her Highness Faye.  Shall I get down and kiss her toes while I'm at it, too?"_

Faye was grinning at that point, enjoying watching Jet put Spike forcibly in his place.  Jet _couldbe rather intimidating when he wanted to.  It cracked her up to see cool, collected Spike pouting like a baby behind his menu, refusing to meet either of their eyes.  "That won't be necessary," she said, airily, and then turned back to Jet.  "And for you, sir?"_

"Coffee, as well," Jet replied, and returned Faye's smile.  She trotted off to pour their coffee mugs, and then and only then did Spike toss his menu down and stare in front of him, running his tongue over his teeth and shaking his head.

"'Kay, I missed something," he said suddenly, as Jet continued to skim his menu.  "Since _when did you start taking the shrew's side on everything?  Because, I mean, it wasn't like I was insulting her or anything.  I was just being a smart-ass."_

Jet decided that he would just go ahead and have what he always had when he came to the diner, which was the number eight cheeseburger and onion rings meal.  It came with a malt.  Jet never _could decide whether the seller was the onion rings or the malt.  They were both damned good.  "That's just it, Spike.  Would it kill you to be pleasant, for once?  You did just forcibly reintroduce yourself into the poor woman's life about a week ago, after all.  She doesn't need any more stress in her life.  I think you'll find that you get a lot farther with Faye by being __nice to her rather than giving her an attitude all the time."_

Spike's eye twitched.  He looked like Jet had just told him to eat a big pile of dog shit.  "_Stress?  She's a waitress in a little po-dink diner, for crying out loud.  That's not stress.  It's a cakewalk compared to what we used to do for a living."_

"For Faye, it's stress."  Jet looked around, making sure the woman was nowhere about close enough to hear, and then leaned across the table a bit, towards Spike.  "Look.  After you…died, she just couldn't really get back into the whole guns-blazing-bounty-hunting deal anymore, okay?  Your _death hit her a lot harder than she might have admitted to you, and whether or not you know it, she kind of actually __cares about you.  I guess I just don't like to see you treating her like a doormat after seeing how she fell apart after you left."  Jet rolled his eyes towards the window, wondering if he had said too much, due to Spike's silence.  "It just doesn't seem __right to stand by and let you continue to treat her like she was just the annoying bitch handcuffed to the head anymore."_

"Huh," was all Spike could muster, fishing for a cig.

"Faye's been trying to live a somewhat normal life for a while, now, and it's not easy for her," Jet continued, upon still not seeing Faye around anywhere.  "She's kind of in limbo between lives right now.  She's still got too much Poker Alice in her to completely fit into this life, but she's still got too much doubt in her to fit into the Poker Alice life anymore.  She's lonely and confused a lot.  So if you could just try not to be a _raging jackass—"_

The clink of two coffee mugs setting down on the table cut Jet completely short and for a moment made him afraid that still, perhaps he had said too much, and perhaps that Faye had _heard too much of what he had been rattling off to Spike.  "Thanks," he muttered to Faye, and waited for her to grumble at him for talking about her.  It never came, though.  Apparently, she hadn't heard him._

"Ditto," Spike muttered just as lowly, and grabbed his coffee to take a long chug of it, apparently not offended by the fact that it was freshly brewed and probably somewhere around a billion degrees.

Faye looked between the two men for a moment and could tell immediately that she had interrupted Jet giving Spike a verbal spanking for _something.  And judging from the way that they were both avoiding her questioning verdant eyes, she deduced that the verbal spanking had been related to her in some way.  __Great, she groaned mentally.  __The last thing I need is Jet trying to convince Spike to magically fall in love with me.  She cleared her throat, and motioned for Jet to scoot over a little bit in his seat, since she would have died before she asked Spike to move his legs._

"It's pretty dead in here," she replied, getting goosebumps when her bare legs touched the cold vinyl of the booth.  "I don't think they'll kill me if I sit down for a minute.  You having your usual, Jet?"

"Yeah," he replied.  "_Extra syrup in the malt."_

"Ugh, God," she said, rolling her eyes and dropping her chin into her open palm.  "You're going to give yourself a heart attack."  She looked to Spike, who was smoking and looking in the opposite direction, doing his best to ignore her existence.  "What're _you having?"_

"Dunno," he said lacklusterly, tapping some ash into the glass tray on the table.  "What's good?"  His hand with the cigarette in it came to rest on the table next to the ashtray, but he still wasn't looking at her, which made it easy for her to pinch the cigarette out from between his fingers, bringing it to her own lips.  She noticed, with a small twinge of jealousy, that he was eyeballing the other waitresses grouped by the register.  

"Half of them are engaged," she couldn't help but comment, and then immediately regretted it.  _Hey, great.  Just make yourself sound like a completely jealous bitch.  _

He gave a sardonic little smirk, and chuckled to himself.  "Aren't all the pretty ones already taken?" he asked rhetorically of no one, and then turned to look at she and Jet.  "It's not so much them as it is the uniforms.  These uniforms can make even _you look good to me, Faye!" he chirped in too cheery to be real enthusiasm.  "That one girl's looks like it's about five inches too short on the bottom.  Isn't there some sort of regulation as to exactly __how much ass you guys can show, or what?"_

Faye gave him a flat look, his cigarette smouldering away in her hand next to her head.  "What would _Julia say," she said, coldly, "if she could hear you now?"_

Spike turned and looked at her, that same small smile plastered on his face, once again masking whatever he might have really been thinking.  "You're a woman.  Why don't _you tell me what she'd say?" he murmured.  He cleared his throat, and blinked at her, apparently determined not to get ruffled by her comment and her steely gaze.  "So what's good here?  Order something decent for me—and gimme back my cigarette, Romany.  Don't you ever have any of your own?  I thought this job kept you in the eats—shouldn't it keep you in the smokes, too?"_

Faye simply flicked the cigarette at him, regardless of the fact that it was still burning, and he caught it with a small amount of bouncing around and utterances of the word 'fuck'.  "It's just much easier to steal yours," she replied coolly, and then stood, collecting the menus and walking off.  She scribbled orders on a ticket and stuck it on the turnstile in the kitchen window, and then joined the group of waitresses by the register again.

The waitress with the skirt that was five inches too short tried to make it five inches longer by tugging on it after Faye's mouth moved at her, indicating that she was obviously informing her of the situation.  The mollified waitress looked over at Jet and Spike with a blush, and then bustled off to check on a table in the far corner of the diner.  

Despite the fact that there was absolutely nothing for her to be doing at the moment, Faye refused to go back over to where Jet and Spike were sitting.  Instead she settled for doodling on her ticket pad again, one hand jabbed into her little white apron, jingling the change she found there.  She pointedly avoided most of the questions directed at her about Jet and Spike, claiming that she didn't feel too good and just kinda wanted to be left alone.      

Somewhere in the middle of her scribblings, the order up bell in the kitchen window rang, and Faye looked over to see her order sitting there waiting for her.  Sighing, she stuck the pad in her apron and shuffled over to the window, shooting the guys in the kitchen a look.  "Couldn't you have been slow, just this once?" she asked tiredly.  Normally the boys in the back had to be fast to keep up with the lunch rushes, but on days like this where there was absolutely nothing to do, they seemed to make the food even fast, chomping at the bit for something to alleviate their boredom.

"We're _bored," one of the cooks whined at Faye.  "D'ya got a cig, Faye?"_

"Get my keys out of my purse.  They're in my car," she replied, grabbing the plates of food and starting towards Jet and Spike with what seemed like lead feet.  Upon reaching their table, she clunked their plates down with nary a word, and then stalked off to retrieve Jet's malt, and then returned that to the table.  

"Anything else?" she asked, without much gusto at all.  Somehow, being around Spike seemed to sap her of all her energy.  Jet shook his head and gave his thanks, already digging into his onion rings, but Spike looked up, _of course, with something to say._

"What's this?" he asked, pointing at his plate like a finicky child with a plate of brussel sprouts in front of them.

Faye sighed and rolled her eyes, reached out, and lifted up the top piece of bread on the sandwich on Spike's plate.  "It's a turkey, ham, and bacon sandwich with lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise, and onion on rye bread."  She re-closed the sandwich and then pointed her finger at the cluster of French fries on the plate.  "Those are French fries.  You take this," she reached across the table, almost leaning in Jet's malt, and grabbed the ketchup, "ketchup, and put them on the French fries.  Any other questions?"

"Is the sandwich good?" Spike asked, eyeing it warily.

_He picked a fine time to suddenly become picky about his damn food, she thought.  "__I like it, anyway," she replied, feeling the beginnings of a headache coming on.  Spike shrugged; that was apparently enough for him, and he picked up the sandwich and took a bite that neatly removed approximately a fourth of it.  He then proceeded to take the bottle of ketchup from Faye and pound on it until about half of it came out onto the French fries.  _

"Tasty," he managed around a mouthful of sandwich.  "Hey, Jet.  You like see food?"  He opened his mouth towards Jet and proudly displayed a half-chewed wad of turkey, ham, and bacon sandwich on rye.

Faye turned suddenly when she felt a hand touch her arm, lightly, and then suddenly her purse and her keys were being handed to her by a smiling Jenny, the waitress five-inches-too-short skirt.  "You're acting half dead," she gently chastised Faye.  "Go home, okay?  It's dead, anyway.  Nothing we can't handle short one person."

Spike looked over at Jenny and smirked, causing her to once again blush, obviously remembering the skirt comment.  "Do _you like see food?"  _

Faye slapped Spike's arm and shoved into the booth next to him before he could open his mouth at Jenny and effectively traumatize her.  "Good Lord, _Gorgio, where'd you learn your table manners?  A barn?" she groused at him, and then looked up to Jenny with an apologetic smile.  "I can stay, you know.  I don't feel so terrible."_

"Nah."  Jenny did her best to ignore the man behind Faye, who was currently engrossed with making the biggest mess out of fries and ketchup that she had ever seen in her life.  Faye's friends sure were _weird.  "We can handle it.  Go home and get some rest."_

Faye relented, realizing that the united task force of friendly coworkers wasn't going to rest until she went home that afternoon.  She set her purse up on the table and looked from Spike to Jet, who was slurping at his malt and raising an eyebrow at her.

"You sick?" he asked, in a tone that was concerned but trying not to be concerned.

"That's why she sat next to me," Spike said, shoving a ketchup with a side of fry into his mouth.

"Uh," Faye began, feeling kind of ridiculous for being sent home sick when she wasn't even really sick, "not really.  Kind of.  Just feeling a little…under the weather, more like it."  She noticed the way Spike and Jet were looking at her oddly while she scrambled for a description.  "I slept like shit last night.  My neighbours decided to play death metal really loudly until about four in the morning," she lied, and that seemed enough to placate Jet, but Spike continued to watch her, stuffing his face all the while.

"So where do you live?" he asked her, popping a piece of ketchup-covered tomato into his mouth.  Faye steeled herself to not stare when Spike's tongue flicked out to catch the stray ketchup at the corner of his mouth, and she instead looked out the window over his head, suddenly interested in the traffic.  

"Not too far from here," she replied simply.  "About ten minutes away."

"You live downtown?" he asked, polishing off the rest of his sandwich, leaving a bit of crust behind.  Faye wondered if the man actually _chewed his food at all or whether he just swallowed it whole._

"Mm-hmm."  

There was silence for a while as both men ate, and Faye simply fell to staring at the tabletop with nothing better to do.  She realized that Spike _must chew his food, because his jaw popped while he was eating in a continual pattern that belied chewing.  She also realized that Jet had a habit of not eating food that became cross-contaminated; he hadn't eaten the onion rings that had been touched by the ketchup that fell off his cheeseburger._

She was suddenly poked in the cheek with something, and turned her head to find Spike jabbing her with a cigarette.  She took it from him and fished in her bag for a lighter, producing a pack of matches instead and lighting it.  "Thanks," she said, and Spike said nothing, but lit up his own cigarette.  She looked over at his plate.  All that was left was the neglected piece of crust and enough ketchup to fill an empty bottle.

"So can I come over?" Spike asked suddenly, blowing smoke out his nose.  Faye blinked, and then looked over at him incredulously.

"The hell do you want to come over for?" she asked, suspiciously.  "It's an apartment.  There's nothing special about it to see."  Faye knew she was fighting a losing battle, though; Spike, most likely, had already set himself on going to her apartment, and it was pointless to try to convince him otherwise.  She bit her lip, and threw in the towel without an argument.  "How're you going to get there?"

"With you," he said matter-of-factly.  "Then you're going to drive me back to the Swordfish later on and I'll go back to the Bebop."

Jet looked at Spike as if the younger man had just grown a third eye.  "You two can't even sit next to each other without some sort of argument—what the hell makes you think that you can stand to be alone with her for _however long without killing each other?"_

Faye's eyes snapped over to Jet, somewhat wide.  "You mean _you're not coming with?" she asked, mildly hysterically.  "__Jet.  I swear to God they'll find his body in a dumpster somewhere if you don't come along to play chaperone."  Jet looked at Faye apologetically, pushing his plate away from him, obviously having finished his meal.  She pleaded with him with her eyes, but eventually he looked away._

"I've got to go back to the Bebop.  I need to get a bounty here, soon.  I'm starting to run kind of low on funds," he explained, and Spike grinned, digging in his pocket for his wallet.  

"I take it I'm paying for my own lunch, then," he quipped, tossing some money on the table, and then jabbing some money in Faye's purse.   "Tip," he explained.

Faye reached into her bag and pulled out the money, counting it with a quickness that belied prior experience with counting money, other than waitressing.  "Cheapskate," she muttered, and Spike jabbed her in the ribs with a bony elbow.  

Jet laid payment for his half of the lunch down on the table as well, and then handed Faye a bit of money, which she also counted deftly, but made no comment about as she had with Spike's.  

Five minutes later, Faye was walking to her car with Spike in tow, whistling through his teeth, as the Hammerhead took off overhead, wondering what the _hell she had just gotten herself into._


	5. Break 'Em On Down

The car ride to the apartment had been a trip and a half, even though it had only taken them all of about fifteen minutes to get from the diner to the apartment.  For whatever reason, Spike had rolled out of the wrong side of the bed that day and his Annoy Faye At All Costs meter was extremely high.  From ragging on her about her driving to assuming control of the radio presets no matter _how_ much she told him to stop fucking with them, he unconsciously seemed bound and determined to make her life an official living hell.

He wasn't even consistent about it.  He switched on and off from trying to annoy her to death to trying to be halfway genial, and by the time she threw open the door to the apartment, Spike figured she was probably picturing him on the other side of the door, getting cracked in the nose.  Strangely enough, he felt kind of bad for being a jerk.

Well, not strangely enough.  That whole pesky conscience thing of his was telling him that he was being unnecessarily persistent in his efforts to be King of the Assclowns.  In order to get his conscience off his back, Spike decided to make a concentrated effort to be a bit nicer to the shrew.

Of course, he had gravitated to the first thing in the apartment that was the most familiar to him—the couch.  All couches, no matter where, no matter what shape, were always the things Spike was most comfortable with.  He'd spent enough time sleeping on them during his lifetime, it was only natural.  He sat there on it for a few minutes while Faye stormed off down the hallway without a single word, presumably to her room to change out of her work clothes.  After the couple minutes of getting comfortable about being in _Faye's_ apartment, he got up and started to explore.

There was a really old television and a small stereo system hooked up directly in front of the couch, and Spike bent down to inspect Faye's music collection.  Some of it was decent, but he discovered that it was mostly a lot of newer electronica music and very, very old Earth music; probably made before even Faye had been born.  Other than the couch and the entertainment system, the living room looked pretty bare.  

There was a small kitchen table with three chairs sitting around it directly behind the couch, and a telephone sat on the kitchen counter, accompanied by a cat.  Spike couldn't help but suppress a grin when he took notice of the cat's markings—it was a _tiger-striped_ cat.  The irony of it was not lost on him.  The cat, however, was a lot fatter than he ever pictured his cat alter-ego being.  It looked as if Faye had gotten into the habit of chronically overfeeding the pet.  The cat, for its part, blinked lazily at Spike and fell to cleaning its paws.

There was a large pile of undesignated shit (for lack of a better word) sitting in the corner near the front door; it appeared to be a jumble of boxes, clothes, and odds and ends.  With yet another suppressed grin, Spike noticed a very familiar white, heeled boot lying at the top of a pile of clothes in the larger pile.  The other one was nowhere to be seen.  

Finally his wanderings brought him to the kitchen.  In light of his new efforts to be kind of nice, he decided not to walk down the hallway that shot off from the living room—just yet, anyway.  Faye probably needed her space for a few minutes, lest she attack him and try to kill him.  The kitchen looked largely unused, except for the overflowing garbage can and the large pile of dishes in the sink.  The dishes appeared as if they hadn't been touched since the day Faye moved into the place.  

The refrigerator in particular caught Spike's attention when he finally got around to looking at it.  It was the spot of colour in the apartment, it seemed, since Faye had apparently stuck everything she had ever thought important on the surface with magnets.  There were a couple of bills, some receipts, and a list entitled "Ten Things That Men Need To Learn About Women".  

_Figures Faye would have a list that went something like that,_ Spike mused, leaning closer to the fridge to fully inspect all the items stuck on it.  One of the things, upon closer inspection, revealed itself to be a very _interesting_ picture drawn by Ed.  It was such a riot of colour and crayon scribbles that the lanky man couldn't even understand what the hell it was supposed to be.  The only thing that tipped him off about its origin was a messy scrawl in the corner, in periwinkle: FOR FAYE-FAYE.  LUV EDWARD (smiley)!

A cluster of pictures on the top corner of the freezer door caught Spike's eye next.  A strip of four photos, obviously from one of those little photo booth things, depicted Faye and an unfamiliar man making various silly faces and grins.  In spite of the fact that she was smiling or acting goofy in each of the four shots, Faye looked like hell.  There were giant dark smudges under her eyes, and she looked paler and thinner than usual.  There were a couple of photos that didn't really catch Spike's attention (although there was a particularly hilarious one of Jet, obviously caught off guard, wearing an apron and holding a pan of something with Ed latched onto his other arm).  

Suddenly—_Holy shit, is that ME_?  He resisted the urge to yank the snapshot off the freezer and study it closer, and instead settled for leaning in so close to it that the tip of his nose was almost touching it.  Indeed it _was_ him, sitting on the couch on the Bebop, looking very hung-over, holding a prairie oyster in his hand.  Ein was lying on the couch next to him, and Faye was sitting in the armchair, looking up from a magazine of some sort.  Jet or Ed were nowhere to be seen, which led him to deduce that one of the two had taken the photo.  

He heard some noises coming from the living room and turned to see Faye scooping the tubby feline up into her arms, staring at him questioningly.  "What are you looking at?" she asked, scratching the cat behind its ears.

Spike pointed at the picture he had been staring at, and furrowed his brow.  "Where did _this_ come from?" he asked, turning to look at the picture again.  "God.  I look so _young_.  And hung-over."

Faye walked over to inspect the picture for herself, even though she knew fully well which one he was talking about.  It was the only picture of Spike she'd ever known in existence.  "Oh, that.  I dunno.  I found that lying around on the Bebop after you di—after you left," she amended just in time, remembering how ridiculous it would sound to say that a man standing in front of her, very much alive, had gone off to die.  "I took it with me when I packed up and left.  I thought it was pretty damn funny."

He couldn't stop staring at it.  It was probably the first picture that he'd seen of himself in years.  He was readjusting to the shock of how funny one looks on film.  "I can't believe how _young_ I look," he finally said, drawing back and shaking his head.  

Faye looked at him out of the corners of her eyes, and noticed that yes, perhaps, he did look quite a bit older.  There were lines present around his eyes and mouth, and his forehead that he had not worn when he had left two years ago to die.  He was, however, still as beautiful as she remembered him.  "Bah.  You're not old until you start going grey," she said, and then the irony of that particular statement coming out of _her_ mouth hit her.  "…Like I'm one to talk.  I'm older than you are by about eighty years or something like that."

Spike blanched, and scratched self-consciously at the back of his mop of slightly curly green hair.  "Funny you should say that.  I found a grey hair the other day," he admitted, looking up at her almost shyly.  "I've been finding them consistently for about a year and a half now," he also admitted.

Faye didn't understand how someone who spent as little time in front of a mirror as Spike did could find a single grey hair, let alone how someone who had as _much_ hair as he did could find one.  Miraculously, she herself had never found a grey hair.  She half expected that one day she would wake up and find that her body had suddenly remembered what age it was _really_ supposed to be, and be all wrinkly and faded.  

"But hey, what the fuck, at least I've still _got_ my hair," he said, looking up with a bright smile, suddenly.  "Jet was halfway bald by thirty or something crazy like that."

"Count your blessings," Faye said simply, and let the cat leap ungracefully from her arms with a small, visible puff of airborne fur.  She cleared her throat and turned away, suddenly decidedly uncomfortable by the lack of animosity in the conversation between them.  She never would figure out how Spike managed to switch from making you want to kill him to making you want to confide your life story to him in point five seconds flat.  "Yeah, so…this is my home.  Aren't you glad that you wasted your _precious_ time to come look at my little hole in the wall?"

"Actually," he began, and then brushed past her and vaulted over the back of the couch nimbly, landing on his side, "_yeah_, I am.  I guess I was wondering how the other half lived."  He was silent for a moment while Faye lingered in the kitchen, wondering if he'd realized that by lying down on the couch that he had taken up all the sitting area in the living room besides the floor.  "I guess I wouldn't believe that _you_, of all people, Poker Alice-Shrew-Loudmouth-Gypsy-Queen had gone on to live an otherwise normal life."

"It's not normal," Faye replied before she could really think about what she was saying.  The cat brushed up against her bare legs, begging for attention.

A mop of unruly green hair and a pair of mismatched reddish brown eyes poked up above the back of the couch, and blinked.  "I missed something.  What's not normal about all of _this_?" he asked, a hand appearing as well to indicate the apartment around them.

"Everything," she said, and then after a moment of no thought, only her brain spooling, added: "_You_, especially."  Immediately afterward she bit her tongue hard enough to draw blood and make her hand clutch reflexively.  _Stupid, stupid, stupid_.

Spike's eyes and forehead stared at her over the couch for a second, and then disappeared from view, and a loud, knowing sigh was heard from the other side.  Then he popped up into a sitting position, scooting over to one end of the couch.  "Would ya mind coming out here and sitting down and explaining precisely why _that_ is?" he asked, patiently, and then as an afterthought, added, "Bring an ashtray if you smoke in here at all."

The only two ashtrays in the apartment were in the bathroom and the bedroom, where she spent the most time when she was home, so she grabbed a glass bowl from the sink instead and ignored the remnants of cereal that were stuck to it.  She knew Spike would, too.  Faye made her way to the couch and flopped down, setting the bowl in between them on the unused cushion.  The man opposite her wasted no time in lighting up.  

"Well?" he asked, not looking at her.

"…You were _dead_," was all she could muster right off the bat, which drew another heavy sigh from Spike, and a flick into the makeshift ashtray.  

"I thought we went over that one before," he replied, rubbing the bridge of his nose.  

"Well, it doesn't just go away because we talked about it once, damnit!" she snapped, and then fell into reticent silence again, trying to nail down one of her myriad thoughts and put it into a sentence.  Half of the myriad thoughts weren't really conversation-worthy, since they would probably cause Spike to never speak to her again.  "It's hard to think that every day for the last two years that we thought you were dead, you were actually alive somewhere and not letting us know, you fuckface."

His jaw clicked.  "I thought we went over _that_ one before, too."  Her living room was starting to become oppressively smoky and he took initiative and stood, pulling the cord for the ceiling fan.  At least his eyes would stop burning from the smoke, then.  

Faye opened her mouth to grind out angry words about him not understanding, but then decided to let it drop.  He obviously wasn't _ever_ going to see what had been done wrong in the situation, so it was best to just forget about it and move on.  "Whatever.  I'm just still not sure where I stand on having you sitting here, on my couch, like _nothing _ever happened."

Spike was very quiet, very still.  He seemed…hurt, somehow.  "You wish I'd never come back at all, huh?  That would've been easier to deal with, right?" he asked, sticking his cigarette in his mouth and leaving it there, folding his hands together on his stomach.

She once again had to pause to think.  As ridiculous as it might have been by that point, she still didn't want him to think that she didn't want him around.  Part of her was trying to endear herself again, make herself semi-tolerable to him, and that part of her knew that annoying him and pushing him away certainly wasn't any way to go about it.  However, Faye knew that she had to formulate at least _some_ sort of response pretty quickly, lest he misinterpret her silence.

"No, that's not it," she replied finally, and then looked around her, surveying her surroundings.  She needed to get off the topic of him for a bit.  "Okay, just because I have a normal job and a normal apartment doesn't mean that I _feel_ normal.  If you think about it…there isn't a damn thing that's even _halfway_ normal about me."

"You've got two eyes and a nose and mouth like everyone else," Spike commented, drolly.  "You've also got two legs, and two arms, and—"

"—I'm secretly in my fifties?" she cut in, looking over at Spike with her eyebrows arched.  He simply looked at her and shrugged, removing his cigarette from his mouth.

"Not really.  If you hadn't been frozen you'd be in your fifties.  You're only—what, almost thirty or something?"

Faye couldn't stop herself from blanching and looking offended.  She leaned away from Spike with a slight sniff.  "Almost _thirty_?  Jesus!  I'm twenty-five!  God, you say it as if I _look_ like I'm almost thirty."  She huffed and only looked over at him quickly to filch his cigarette for a puff.  "The thing is that I _feel_ like I'm fifty.  I feel like Poker Alice.  I feel like the bounty hunter.  I know that people know that something's funny with me.  I mean, isn't it obvious?  My reflexes are just a tad too fast for someone who's a waitress by profession, and I _know_ that people know that something's up when they sit down to a card game with me."

Spike looked amused.  "They know something's up?  As in the ace up your sleeve?"

She got half of a chuckle out of that comment; even if there wasn't an ace up her sleeve, she had mastered the art of rigging a deck and counting cards—she won, even when she wasn't cheating in the extreme.  "Me and some of the girls from work play cards sometimes.  I remember the first time we sat down to play, I dealt, and when I was finished and looked up, everyone was just kind of like, 'holy shit'.  I'd let the mild-mannered Faye mask slip too much."

A snicker issued forth from the man next to her, and he pinched his cigarette back, only to take one more drag and then kill it in the cereal bowl.  "You'll adapt," he said simply, once again folding his hands over his stomach, unconsciously laying them over the jagged scar that ran across his abdomen.  "You're a gypsy.  You've got to blend somehow.  And while all this equivalent of teenage awkwardness in the real world is _fascinating_, Faye," he said, picking at a button on his shirt, "I entirely fail to see what it's all got to do with _moi_."

Faye frowned and her mind stumbled.  Damnit.  She thought she'd effectively steered him away from the topic of him, but Spike was insufferably persistent when he wanted to be.  _Uh, well, it's because to tell the truth, Spike dear, I'm crazy in love with you.  Oh dear, I have to run to the powder room.  Want me to get you anything while I'm up?_  

Faye pictured herself saying something along those lines to Spike, and Spike taking a small amount of time to process it…and then getting up and walking out without a word.

She realized that it was going to be close to impossible to explain why he had such an impact on her world without either admitting how she felt or sounding completely infantile.  She was going to have to opt for the infantile option.

"In case you hadn't noticed, things went downhill after you left," she said, sourly, knowing she sounded very stupid for blaming it all on him.  "We all could have stayed on the Bebop forever and did what we did—but _no_, you had to up and leave, and I had to start a new life."

"I refuse to believe that your life was so centered around me," he said dismissively, and rolled his eyes towards the ceiling.  "Oops!  So sorry that you let your life fall to shit because _mine_ did," he chirped sarcastically, which is what Faye herself probably would have done if someone had just blamed the rotten nature of their life on _her_.  Having Spike treat her like she was thirteen was better than having Spike avoid her out of awkwardness for the rest of her life, though.

In the meantime, she'd just go quietly nuts, if anyone had been wondering.

"Yeah, well, whatever," she muttered, not really wanting to develop the semi-lie any further.  Inside she felt a small pang of guilt because sometimes she had grumbled to herself—_if only the damn lunkhead hadn't left and died—_and there she was, using it as an excuse.  

"The point is, Faye," he said suddenly in a tone that sounded as if she had just asked him a question, "you've got to _move on_.  You're only uncomfortable in life because you're _making_ yourself uncomfortable.  If being your average, run-of-the-mill hips-lips-and-tits diner waitress doesn't toot your horn, then go back to bounty hunting.  And if that doesn't blow the horn either, then go…study botany or something.  Or become a tele-evangelist.  Or become a Girl Scout troop leader.  Or _something_.  _Anything_.  Just stop moping about how your current life sucks, because whining about it and trying to blame it on me or on Poker Alice or on whatever _isn't_ making it any better.  Who needs words when you've got action, right?"  

"_Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose_," Faye commented, quietly.  "Janis Joplin said that."  
"Who?" Spike asked, and then shook his head, blinking.  "Nevermind.  It's true.  It's never too late to change.  Wanna wallow in the past?  Fine, go ahead.  Do it, be my guest.  Just don't come dragging it around my feet.  Living in the past doesn't bring you anything—I'd like to think that I'm somewhat of _the_ authority on this particular subject—and thinking about it forever certainly doesn't do anything either.  I got no time for sorrow in my life anymore, woman."

Faye was still reeling from Spike's confusion about _Janis Joplin_, but then remembered that half of the people in the solar system didn't bother with old Earth music because…well, Earth was considered kind of obsolete.  She made a mental note to play Janis for Spike sometime; she seemed like she'd be right up Spike's alley.  

"Do whatever it is you women do when you decide you want to make a giant overhaul in your lives," Spike went on, lighting up another cigarette, and blowing the smoke out his nose like a dragon.  "Buy yourself a new wardrobe, or dye your hair, or something.  Julia always opted for the buying herself a new wardrobe option.  She never could decide whether she wanted to look like the cute little girl next door or the emo mod rock chick who hung out in art galleries."  He blinked.  "But whatever.  That's the extent of my knowledge of women.  You're always wanting to change.  But your first step is always something stupid and superficial like changing your hair or your car or your clothes.  One of the last things that Julia did before she disappeared into the void was buying that damned stupid car of hers.  It guzzled gas and was breaking down every other week—so old, you see.  Vintage parts, extremely hard to get."  
He blinked again, and sighed.  "Sorry.  I'm not meaning to talk about her so much.  She's the only woman I really ever knew, so I'm kind of lump-summing my info, here.  I guess all I'm saying is…don't be like Julia."

Faye's heart leapt into her throat, fell down into her stomach, and then leapt back to its resting spot.  _Did he just say what I thought he said?_

"Jules thought she could change her life by running from it and changing dumb little things instead of standing her ground and facing the facts.  I tried that for a while too, and once again… look at where it got us.  It got her killed, and it got me half-killed."

Faye swallowed, her throat suddenly dry.  "That's a different situation."

"Of course it is," Spike replied.  "No one's going to try to kill you because you're feeling like a sore thumb in your new life.  It's just—" 

Suddenly he stopped talking, and kind of threw his hands up, and then said no more for a few seconds.  "I don't know.  Take it any which way you want.  I don't like to dispense advice; it makes me feel like I'm talking circles around myself.  Makes me feel hypocritical, a lot.  I especially don't like dispensing advice to someone whom I feel is sharp enough to know better," he said pointedly, looking at her with an eyebrow raised.  "You're a bright kid.  You'll get it figured out eventually."  

She felt like he should have been giving her a small punch on the side of the face and drawling something like, "You're alright, kid," with the way he sounded.  She didn't like to receive advice from him as much as he didn't like to give it; somehow Faye always walked away from it feeling very young and immature.  Maybe it was because that even for all the stupid things she had known Spike to do, he was no fool.  One could learn a lot from him, if they learned to filter out the bullshit and read between the lines.

She tried to imagine Spike as a father, dolling out life lessons and advice to a smaller version of himself; half of his hair grey and a cigarette hanging from his lips.  

"When you go grey," she said suddenly, curious, "do you think it'll be gradual or you'll just wake up one day and have half a head of grey hair?"

He laughed, killing yet another spent cigarette over the bowl, gnashing it out with his thumb and his forefinger, apparently not bothered by the small ember.  "Wake up one day and have half a head of grey hair," he said, smoke coming out of his mouth in little spurts as he spoke.  He took a second after he spoke to exhale and force the last little bit out.  "Everything about me has to be as dramatic as possible, right?  I couldn't possibly get any sillier looking unless I grew a second head.  Half a head of grey hair wouldn't be so bad.  Grey hair is dead _sexy_."

She snorted a bit of laughter, incredulous.  "Just keep telling yourself that, old man."

Miraculously, when they knew no one was looking, Spike and Faye actually got along without many hitches.  There were still problems; there would always be problems—that was just what happened when two people with strong wills and smart mouths got together.  Only a few times in the entire history of their relationship had they actually dropped the bullshit long enough to be able to spend some semi-bonding time.  That afternoon was one more time added to the short list.

Once Spike stopped being an asshole who slung insults constantly and Faye stopped being the World's Best Actress who was too tough for her own good, they actually managed to get along pretty well.

Alcohol helped, too.  They weren't drunk, but they weren't sober either.  Faye's cat sat on Spike's stomach, purring against his scar as he lay on Faye's couch (which was too small for him, as with most couches, his feet hung off the edge).  Faye sat on the floor, cigarette burning in one hand and a pile of discarded CD cases next to her.

"Or, how about this one?" she asked of him, over the music, reading intently from a CD booklet.  "'Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose'," she intoned importantly, pausing afterwards to take a small swig out of a bottle of vodka that she'd brought into the living room.

Spike was busy petting his cat-alter-ego, and turning his clothing into a cat's hair nest.  He'd decided not too long ago that he'd had enough of the good old firewater for the time being; his extremities were beginning to tingle fuzzily with that familiar inebriated feeling, and he was starting too think too hard about things that really didn't make any sense when he _really_ thought about them.  That was one of the sure signs that he'd had enough to drink, as far as he was concerned.  "I don't know if that one's true or not," he answered after a few moments, and then tried to pick out some cat hair that had magically found its way into his mouth.

"Why not?" Faye asked him, as if he'd just said he didn't believe in Jesus or something like that.  

Spike mulled over this for a moment.  In all honesty, the new combination of Janis Joplin and alcohol was a little much for him.  It wasn't that Spike didn't like her, in fact, he was pleasantly surprised that Faye even listened to music that was halfway worth listening to.  He liked Joplin's voice—just gritty enough to be kind of ugly, but just fascinating enough to be listen-worthy.  He figured it was kind of like him.  "Because your freedom is everything.  If you still have your freedom, then you still have that to lose.  You don't respect your freedom until you don't have it anymore, I guess."

"Oh."  Faye didn't seem to have any thoughts on that particular subject, which kind of irked Spike.  She always asked him the questions but never seemed to have anything to add or any thoughts of her own.  Spike suspected she did, in fact, he _knew_ she had her own opinions about everything she asked him about, but he realized that for whatever reason she considered him a wellspring of some sort of bizarre genius, and was soaking up all his answers like a dry washcloth in water.  

He wasn't an idiot.  He had realized long ago that Faye looked up to him a tad more than was seemly for a relationship of their type.  He had always figured the best thing he could do was not let on that he'd figured it out, and just be as big of an ass as possible.  She'd lose interest in him eventually or grow out of her crush or whatever, and all the better for her.  Spike thought that he should carry around disclaimers in his pockets so that whenever he caught a girl staring at him he could pull one out and hand it to her, hopefully making her stop staring and walk down the street in the other direction as fast as humanly possible.  It would go something like this (he'd actually written it up one night while rollickingly drunk, but lost it):

'WARNING: The substance (hereafter referred to as one 'Spike Spiegel') you are currently viewing with your eyes/hearing with your ears/pondering with your brain is, in fact, highly corrosive, volatile, and has a criminal record.  Spike Spiegel drinks straight from the carton, does not clean up after himself, and will eat you out of house and home.  Spike Spiegel has killed people, will kill people, and sees no reason to stop killing people anytime soon.  All major Syndicates across the galaxy know Spike Spiegel's name and either fear him or want him dead.  Spike Spiegel smokes enough to cause cancer in lab rats by simply touching them, drinks enough alcohol to breathe fire without matches, and knows enough swear words to offend even pirates.  Spike Spiegel in many cases believes that there is absolutely nothing wrong with lying, cheating, stealing, or committing acts of violence.  Spike Spiegel is going on thirty, believes he's still fifteen, and has never had a college education, and more than likely never will get one.  Spike Spiegel does not want kids anytime soon, if ever, he does not want a mother-in-law, and believes in doing his laundry approximately once a month.  This product, Spike Spiegel, is not recommended to _ANYONE_.'

Spike wished he'd given a copy of Faye that when she first met him.  However, Spike knew that if Faye also had a disclaimer, hers would go something like this:

'WARNING: The substance (hereafter referred to as one 'Faye Valentine') you are currently ogling with your eyes/semi-listening to with your ears/fantasizing about with your deep, dark brain is, in fact, highly crooked, completely unstable, and has a bounty on its head.  Faye Valentine will drink straight from cartons and put it back empty, then claim she never drank it, will make messes and then claim she did not make them, and will steal all your food and then claim that she didn't.  Faye Valentine has cheated people, will cheat people, and furthermore _loves_ to cheat people.  Every casino in the galaxy knows Faye Valentine's face and sends out their entire security force the moment she walks in the door (no matter which one).  Faye Valentine smokes enough to go through several of _your_ packs a day, drinks enough alcohol to carry a proof label of her own, and habitually lies…whether or not she wants to.  Keep staring; that's exactly what she wants you to do, but don't be surprised when you feel a gun pressed into your side.  Faye Valentine will not tell you her real age; you don't want to know it.  Faye Valentine would not cook you dinner, nor would she do your laundry, nor would she fit in well at a family dinner.  This product, Faye Valentine, is not recommended to _ANYONE_.'

Spike watched Faye sitting there in the middle of her living room reading the lyrics out of the CD booklet to herself, completely immersed in her bottle and her musical words of wisdom, her cigarette burning so low it was threatening to burn _her_.  For once she seemed as if she'd forgotten that Spike was even there.  

Sometimes, oddly enough, Spike regretted that he hadn't met Faye earlier in his lifetime.  She was just as bad as he was; at one point in time, they might've made a nice, kind of fucked-up couple.  There was too much between them now, he feared (well, not feared, but felt); too much time, too much pain, too much history.

Plus he had the feeling that they were both too jaded to fall in love again—well, he with her, and she too hurt to completely trust anyone…regardless of how she felt about them.  They'd both erected completely solid walls around themselves, and Spike knew that even though yeah, he guessed he'd call Faye his friend and she'd call him hers, they weren't and never would be that close, at all.  Their walls were too thick.

And that's why Spike knew he had to quit drinking, when he started drinking just enough to make him look across the living room at the chain-smoking, quick-tongued, gypsy-queen-waitress-with-a-Glock and think that if he were smart, he'd be sleeping with her, at the very least.  

But he knew that was wrong, _very_ wrong.  It would bring their whole little world crashing down in on itself; it'd drive him mad and it'd probably kill Faye.  He could not make himself feel something more than what he felt for her, no matter whether or not he wanted to, just like she couldn't make herself stop looking at him like he was Jesus Resurrected—and yes, he knew that look in her eye.  It was more than a crush.  The little voice in the back of his head told him that if he kept _telling_ himself that it was just some cute little big-brother infatuation that she had with him, then that's all it would be.  

He was to Faye as Julia had been to him—so close, but somehow always magically out of reach.  Because, somehow, deep down, he'd always known—

--Christ, now he really _was_ thinking too much, and was kind of vaguely glad that Faye had wandered off into the kitchen for something—

--that Julia loved him, but not as much as she loved Vicious.  For _whatever_ reason.  She'd been driven to Spike out of necessity, out of the hurt that bloomed within her when Vicious started to look less at her and more at his work and the Syndicate.  When he turned cold and distant to even _her_, she sought comfort somewhere else.  Spike.  And as much as he lied to himself and tried to tell himself that someday, someday he'd win her over to his team completely, when he looked in her eyes he saw the rampant sadness that said she _knew_ that he _knew_ that if things were to suddenly go sunny-side-up with Vicious that she'd leave him heartbroken because she _had to_.  Julia couldn't lie to herself about her emotions anymore than Spike could, or Faye could, or _anyone_ with a conscious could.  

And yet, despite his knowledge about Julia, Spike kept right on loving her, living with the tiny hope that she'd completely pick him, that one day things would be alright, doing it all because it felt good _right then_, never mind how bad it would hurt later on down the road.  Just like Vicious and he had kept their little feud going on for way longer than it needed to go on, lending a little purpose to two lives that had otherwise lost a majority of it.  Just like Faye could scream and holler and call him Lunkhead and try her damndest to convince herself that he really _wasn't_ worth her time, but couldn't keep that goofy light out of her eyes whenever she looked at him and desperately tried to hide that goofy light.

Human beings were sick, masochistic creatures, Spike decided.  And then Faye walked back into the living room, smoking another cigarette, sipping from the bottle of vodka.  She was hurtling towards drunkenness.  

"So, you never explained," she began, cigarette dangling from her lips, "what this _grand _plan you have is.  So spill."

Spike _really _regretted not meeting Faye earlier in life.  He really regretted that their walls were too high and wide for him to really get to know the woman behind the mask.  Crazy, crazy drunk thinking.  

"Highway robbery," he commented lazily, and started laughing.  Faye began to laugh too, probably only because she was pleasantly drunk and Spike had a laugh like a goon.  Then she calmed down.  

"No, but seriously," she giggled, ashing her cigarette on the carpet without a care.  "Spill."

Spike wiped at something in his eye, a tear of mirth?  "I told you.  Highway robbery.  Mint robbery, to be more precise."  He began to snicker about it again even as Faye gave him a 'You Must Be Crazy Or Drunk And God Help Me, I Can't Tell Which One' look.  "Aw, c'mon.  It isn't any less serious than swindling casinos out of thousands of dollars of their money," he added, upon noting that the look seemed to be stuck on Faye's face.

"Jesus," she murmured, sticking her cigarette between her lips.  "Yeah, it is!  There's a whole hell of a lot of difference between a casino and a mint, Spike.  One's government operated.  One carries a lot bigger penalty for knocking over."

Spike sighed and launched into his explanation; the _Olmo Nero_, the _Sombras_, everything.  And for good measure, he tacked on his statement about getting tired of being the fuckee, it was about time that he was the fucker.  Faye just huffed a little and shook her head, cigarette bobbing while she pursed and unpursed her lips.  

"You're nuts," she said.  "What do I have to do with all of this?"

"Whaddya think?" Spike asked.  "That I want you to make sandwiches for the picnic?  Faye, it isn't exactly a one man operation.  It's a one man, one half-man half-machine, one sneaky woman, and one strange kid operation.  You're inherently dishonest enough to do it and semi-trustworthy enough to be down with it."  

"Only _semi_-trustworthy?" she sniffed, putting her hand on her hip and jutting it to the side slightly; all curves and Spike with no brakes.  If there was one thing that Spike wished he could thank Faye for, it was all the years of decent eye-candy.  Her personality may have been tragically flawed, but her body was tragically perfect.  "And good luck on finding Edward.  That kid finds _you_ when and where she wants to."

"So I've heard," Spike replied, trying not to focus on the way Faye's skirt followed the lines of her legs.  Note to Spike, he thought to himself, avoid drinking around Faye _alone_ in the future.

"Ugh, oh, _fine_," Faye groused, smashing her cigarette in the bowl near Spike, and taking a long swig of the bottle before offering it to him.  Against his better judgement, he took it from her.  "Ms. Inherently Dishonest But Staight Enough or whatever will join you in your little escapade.  But if she ends up in jail, someone's head is going to roll."

"There will be no head rolling," Spike said, holding the bottle to his lips.  "Just a whole lot of rolling in money."


	6. Karmacoma

Karmacoma

"You're crazy but you're lazy  
I need to live and I need to  
Your troubles must be seen to see through  
Money like it's paper with faces I remember  
I drink on a daily basis  
Though it never cools my temper  
It never cools my temper"

- Massive Attack, Karmacoma

"I drink an awful lot," Spike said plainly, smashing a beer can in his hand, and setting it on the table-thing in the middle of the Bebop's living room-thing.  Jet looked up from a newspaper that may have been, in fact, from the week before.  Jet and Spike debated about it for a while, but neither of them knew the date, so they let it drop.  

"Mhh-hmm," Jet replied, looking back down to his paper.  He looked austere and fatherly with his reading spectacles on.  Spike opened another beer that he had wedged in the couch next to him for that very purpose.

"I mean, seriously," he went on, taking a sip of beer.  "Don't you ever stop and think about the things you do and why you do them, and how they affect your life?"

Jet turned a page.  "Mhh-hmm."

"It's kind of like karma; except not really.  I'm only talking about things you do, here, not things you do to other people or that affect other people.  I'm talking about, like, what time you brush your teeth at every day, what kind of toothpaste you use, whether or not you brush your teeth at all."  Spike played with the tab on his beer.  "Y'know, that sort of thing."

Jet was riveted to the newspaper.  Hey, coupons.  Buy one get one free two percent milk.  "Mhh-hmm."

"I guess I think that drinking is better than a lot of things that I could be doing in place of drinking, though," Spike said, regarding the beer for a moment before downing some more of it.  "I'm just like that.  I'm an addictive personality.  I'm all or nothing.  I've always got to have something, you know?  If it wasn't alcohol and cigarettes it'd probably be crack or cocaine or synchronized swimming or something insane like that."

"Mhh-hmm."

Spike sat forward on the couch and looked at Jet intently, holding his beer in two hands between his legs.  "You know, you people used to bitch about how I never talked about myself.  Now that I talk about myself, you don't even listen.  I can't win.  What the hell's so damned interesting in that paper, anyway?"  Spike reached over and plucked the paper from Jet's hands in one fluid motion, and settled back with it as Jet made a stern face of disgruntlement.

"Hey," he growled.  "What're you doing?"

"Jet," Spike growled back.  "I'm glad to know that the coupon section of the paper is more interesting than hearing about me and my thoughts."  
Jet nabbed his paper back, though with considerably less grace and fluidness than Spike had nabbed it.  "I got news for you, Spike," he said, settling back into the chair and adjusting his reading glasses, "the world doesn't revolve around your drunken blather and I've got to buy food to eat.  Two for one milk gallons is more interesting to me than your philosophical babble about karma.  I already went through my I'm Relatively Young And Confused years.  I already went through the Coming To Grips With Not Having The Woman Around Anymore phase."

"You're getting tired of me, aren't you?" Spike asked, sounding mildly defeated.

Jet looked at him over the edge of the paper.  "I'm getting tired of seeing you drunk on my couch every day, eating my food, going on endlessly about things that don't make any sense and bothering the hell out of me while I'm just trying to be old and harmless.  I'm getting tired of seeing you not do anything.  Hell, even Faye was never this bad."

Spike grumbled discontentedly, took a sip of his fifth beer, and let the information sink in a little.  Jet was kind of right; he hadn't been doing much of anything for about a week and a half save getting drunk and lazing about.  Hell, he hadn't even been practicing his forms or anything.  He justified it to himself by saying that he couldn't do anything until Ed decided to make herself present and apparent, but then again, he could be looking for her a little on his own instead of just waiting for her to appear.

"I'm going to Earth, later on," Spike informed Jet.  "Maybe tomorrow.  I'd like to be sober when I go."

Jet eyed Spike again.  "Why are you going to Earth?"

"Find Ed," he replied, shaking his beer can.

Jet hmmed, and marveled at the fabulous deals on canned carrots.  "If you go, you should tell Faye.  She's been wanting to go back to Earth for a while."

"It's not a fucking pleasure cruise," Spike said, kind of wanting to avoid any excuse for himself to be drunk around just Faye for a while.  He was beginning to think that he might, just might have a mild drinking problem.  "It's a business trip."

"Faye's got business there," Jet said, and closed his paper.  "I'm off to the store."

Spike got that old motherly instinct while Jet was gone and ended up drinking a bit more and doing some dishes, some laundry, and cleaning his guns.  He accidentally broke a plate, but figured that Jet wouldn't notice and cleaned it all up fairly well and placed the broken pieces in the proper garbage receptacle.  

He tried to picture himself married (to Julia of course, he never could picture himself marrying anyone else out of the sheer nature of lack of long-term relationships), doing these sorts of things all the time because naturally, any wife with half a brain would insist that her husband do some of the work.  He pictured a wife bitching at him about his drinking, forbidding him to go through with his plan, pestering him about going to Earth to find Ed.  And screaming at him to mow the lawn or fix the car or kill the spider in the bathroom or what have you.  

He was suddenly glad he'd never gotten married.

But then he reminded himself that he was looking at all the negative aspects of marriage; not that he would fully understand the dynamic of marriage anyway, since he'd never been married.  There were lots of nice things about marriage, too.  If you were truly tired and worn out, your wife would take pity on you and do the chores.  Your wife would know how you liked your mashed potatoes (chicken broth in the mix, lots of butter and salt and pepper, no chunks of potato), and your wife would be that nice warmness on the other side of the bed.  Your wife would be an ego boost because she was yours, and you were hers, and that was the way it was supposed to be so help you God and the power of the state of wherever.  

Spike did not believe in divorce, unless a guy was fucked up and hitting his wife or something, or there was infidelity.  Infidelity in relationships was okay (Spike figured he'd be a hypocrite if he were against that), but infidelity in marriage was wrong, wrong, wrong.  A person promised.  A person promised, legally and emotionally promised to have no other and then goes and does it?  Screwed up.

Spike munched quietly on a ham sandwich and drank a beer at the Bebop's table.  The ham sandwich had lots and lots of mustard on it because Spike really, really liked mustard.  He really, really liked ketchup too, which confused the hell out of him.  People were either classified as those who preferred ketchup, or those who preferred mustard.  He was both.  What the hell did that mean?  It couldn't possibly bode well.

And why was ketchup spelled catsup sometimes?  Hmmmm.

Apparently the ham sandwich was doing little to soak up the alcohol that was in his system.

A ship was entering the hangar.  Jet was back.  Spike resumed eating his sandwich, savouring the mustardy goodness, when he suddenly paused again.  No.  That wasn't the Hammerhead.  That was—

--that was the Redtail.  Good Lord, Faye, here; and there he was without another ham and mustard sandwich to offer as greeting.  He was running pretty low on beer, too, he thought.

The sound of the hatch grinding open, shut, footsteps, Faye poking her head into the kitchen and looking around before finally settling her eyes on Spike.  "Where's Jet?" she inquired as a way of greeting.

"Out shopping," Spike mumbled around sandwich.  "He was practically getting off on the milk specials."

"Ah."  Faye stepped in, blue t-shirt and well-worn hip huggers and faded old sneakers.  She looked like college punk-rock show fare.  "I decided I'd drop by."

"Wanna beer?" Spike asked, finishing off his sandwich and placing the plate in the sink.  Faye considered it for a moment, and then shook her head.  

"Neh," she replied, shrugging.  "Haven't really had an appetite for beer lately."

"I've had too much of an appetite for beer lately," Spike said.  "Hmm.  Never thought I'd see the day when you turned down a drink."

Faye favoured him with a surly look, leaning against the fridge, squaring her shoulders and trying to make the most of her diminutive height when confronted with Spike (the fact that he was sitting down was to her definite advantage).  "What's that supposed to mean, you bum?" 

Spike made the most of his height, stood up, and looked down at Faye.  "Exactly what it sounds like, you gypsy—I didn't think I'd see the day."

Faye waved her hand in front of her face and rolled her eyes back, theatrically exaggerating her movements.  "Whoa.  Good Christ.  Today was obviously not that day for you."  She eyeballed the beer on the table and shrugged with her eyebrows.  "Is living with Jet so bad that it's driven you to the drink?"

Spike snorted, and headed towards the living room, beer in hand.  "It's people like you that drive people like me to the drink."  He flopped down on the couch, careful not to spill his beverage, and looked at the ceiling.  Blurry.  "How do you eat your mashed potatoes, heathen?"

Faye looked at him oddly from the kitchen hatch, hands stuck in the pockets of her delightfully snug jeans.  "Without lumps.  I like the homogenous mixture of potato, not potato chunks and potato puree.  Butter."  She huffed.  "And what the hell does that have to do with anything?"  
Spike bit his lip and shuddered at the implications of Faye liking her potatoes just as he liked them.  Well, not exactly like he did, but close enough.  His brain hurt.  "A lot."  

"Whatever."  Faye came down into the living room and sat in the chair by the couch, folding her arms over her chest and grousing, in general.  

There was silence.  Faye was too irritated to talk to Spike and Spike was too tied up in thought to even give two shits about Faye's presence at the moment.  Both silently wished for Jet's return, as some sort of mediator to the conflict that they'd stumbled headlong into.  

"I haven't eaten decent mashed potatoes in a long time," Spike observed, finally, and Faye didn't reply.  Then: "Do you believe in karma, Faye?"

Faye was still silent, but it was a heavy sort of silent, the silence of a person who's deciding whether or not they want to stay silent or if they want to talk.  Eventually her inability to not humour Spike kicked in.  "Yes.  If karma's real, I'm going to be in a karma coma one of these days."

Spike frowned.  The term was new to him.  "Karma coma?"

"Yeah," Faye said.  "You know, like all the bad things I've done to people are going to catch up to me all at once and just bury me.  Immobilize me.  Something like that."

"Wow.  That's a crappy way of looking at it."

"It's a realistic way of looking at it."  She fiddled with her nails.  "Do you believe in karma?"

"Yep," Spike said, and didn't explain why.  Faye didn't ask why.

She knew it was probably because Spike knew that he was in for an even worse karma coma than her.

"So, what's the occasion for the visit?" he asked her.

Faye paused.  Why was she there?  "I don't know, really," she murmured, looking around her at the Bebop.  "Boredom, I guess."

"Yeah, I guess," Spike replied, with a tone that sounded too knowing for Faye's liking.

So Spike's going to Earth, whoop-dee-freak, Faye thought to herself.  I don't even know why he told me.  I mean, I guess I do, but it's not like I'd want to go there with him, anyway.  All it would do was make things awkward.  Yeah, that'd be rad.  Me, sobbing incoherently over the tombstones of parents I barely even remember, and Spike standing there smoking a cigarette, trying his damndest to pretend that nothing's happening.  

Faye tried to keep herself perfectly still, getting some sort of small pleasure out of how still the water in the bathtub became when she concentrated really hard and didn't move at all.  She'd spend hours on the Bebop that day, and had finally returned home about an hour ago.  She'd then proceeded directly into the bath, to do some serious thinking.

I don't know if I like Spike when he drinks, anymore, she mused, eyeing her pack of cigarettes on the lip of the bathtub, but too engrossed in being perfectly still to reach for them and light one up.  It used to be, like, amusing.  Kind of like, ha ha, funny, look, Spike's drunk and it's funny, because he's goofy and weird and more inclined to be friendly to everyone—even inanimate objects!  Now it's like, Spike is drunk and thinking too much.  Overthinking some things, and thinking about things that he shouldn't be thinking about.

Faye had often had ugly feelings in her gut about what Spike might have known about her feelings for him.  The last time she had seen him before he went off to die, she might as well have just told him she loved him, because it was all laid out right there.  There had to have been no mistaking it; Spike wasn't an idiot.  However, it seemed that he was fairly unconcerned with the whole affair.  If she loved him, whatever.  If she hated him, whatever.  If she turned out to actually be an alien from the planet Mlerp, whatever.  That seemed to be Spike's opinion on the whole thing.

But not as of late, seemingly.  Something in the way Spike was acting and talking and being made Faye think that he was spending some time analyzing the situation and, in a way, deciding whether or not he was going to tolerate it anymore.  There was no doubt in her mind that he knew exactly what was going on, now.  Before, she thought that maybe he thought her feelings would just go away, or something.  Now—she knew what he was thinking.

He thinks they won't go away unless he does something about it.  Which he probably will.  Faye had been waiting for the proverbial Damocles' sword to drop on her at any moment that day, while on the Bebop.  Spike could only walk around the same tree so many times before he chopped it down.  

Shit.  Shit shit shit.  Faye sunk down further into her bathwater, forgetting about her quest for stillness of liquid, and lit up a cigarette.  For a while she didn't move, just sitting and smoking, and the bathroom fogged up and was vaguely reminiscent of a very humid, smoky swamp.  

The situation was bad.  Faye had no idea what to do, how to prepare, how she would react—the whole fact of the matter was that Spike was about as predictable as a volcano eruption.  One could kind of gauge how long he had to go until he was about to burst, but not really.  And then there was the annoyance and terror present in Faye because she knew that no matter what she did, even if she did have some way of knowing exactly when Spike was going to confront her about her feelings, she wasn't going to be able to handle it…well.  

Oh, yeah, THAT, Faye thought.  I was going to tell you about that, Spike.  Someday.  Really, I was.  No kidding.

But that day was not today, nor was it tomorrow, nor was it any time soon, if Faye had her way.  She sunk down into the bathwater until only her head was not submerged, and put out her cigarette in the water and laid it on the bathtub's lip.  

It's so much easier to keep dancing around it in misery than it is to be spurned and have it over with, isn't it, Faye?  She watched the ash flecks float around on the surface of the water, and it reminded her of how Spike used to somehow magically smoke cigarettes while showering.  

She submerged herself completely.  


	7. exchange

Perhaps searching for Ed on Earth had not been the brightest idea ever.  Earth was kind of big, after all.  According to what Jet had told him, last word received from Ed had said that she would be located on the Australian continent with her father for an extended period of time.  Apparently, there'd been a lot of meteoric activity there lately.

So Spike had been flying low over Australia with his electronic sensors on, hoping to pick up something, _anything_.  He'd stopped at a few po-dink little burgs he spotted from the cockpit of the Swordfish, but no one seemed to know anything about an eccentric and his even more eccentric daughter.

_Man_, Spike mused, looking to either side of him.  _This place sure does suck_.  Why anyone would voluntarily live on Earth, let alone _this_ particular section of Earth, befuddled him.  He had seen nothing but flat, reddish-brown desert for hours.  He'd seen the giant rock that everyone made a big deal about, and was distinctly unimpressed.  Ayers' Rock, or some shit like that.  _Who cared_?  It was a big rock.  Wow.  Give the Earth a cookie for having some tectonic plate action!

Spike was vaguely shocked that he even knew what tectonics was.  After all, it wasn't like Mars had plate tectonics or anything.  For whatever reason, he'd watched a show on one of those learning channels once about Earth; its volcanism, its seismic activity, its plate tectonics.  It'd been pretty interesting.  But it made Spike _really_ think about why people had ever lived on Earth, at all.  Obviously it wasn't exactly the most calm and non-volatile place around.  

That's why Mars was nice.  Not much of anything happened on the Red Planet.  Dust storms.  Rain.  Crappy weather.  Bad traffic.  That was about the extent of it.  

Spike made a mental note to kick himself in the ass the next time he thought of going to look for anyone or any_thing_ on Earth.  It was damned boring, and thus far, yielded no results _other_ than boredom.  

Jet jiggled the little card around in his hand, feeling supremely pleased with himself.  He also wondered why it seemed easier to nab bounties when there was only _one_ person working on it, and why it seemed harder to nab them when there was a combined effort of _four _people working on it.  He figured it probably had something to do with the dynamic of the four people; how they interacted, and whatnot.  Maybe they would've actually gotten more accomplished as a team if Spike hadn't been so determined to go balls-to-the-wall to his death, if Faye hadn't been as do-it-her-way-or-no-way as she had been, and if Ed hadn't been…well, as crazy as Ed was.  

He'd moved the Bebop from Mars early that morning, parting ways with Spike for the time being.  Spike had promised he'd make his way back to the Bebop on Jupiter before the day was over, but Jet had the feeling he wasn't going to see Spike until Spike had succeeded in locating Ed—which was probably going to take longer than one day.  The letter from Ed that said she was going to be in Australia was a little over a month old; chances that she was still there were extremely slim to none.  

Jupiter.  Jet didn't like Jupiter, nor did he like any of the satellites surrounding it.  Too many bad memories.  Jet didn't really care for Ganymede anymore, and Jupiter was too close to Ganymede for his liking; therefore, Jet didn't like Jupiter anymore.

Plus, the weather was terrible.  But then again, Jet didn't really like Mars much either.  He wondered if there was a place out there for him, should he ever decide to settle down again and stop this whole bounty hunting business, or if he would come to find something about every single place he went to that he didn't like.  

And yet, despite his dislike for Jupiter, there he was, walking into a bar on Jupiter, jiggling his little money card around in his hand, the little card that had just become about 4 million wulongs more expensive all of an hour ago.  

The Black Dog deserved a drink.

Despite the insanity of the lunch rush hour, Faye still found time to be thinking.  Both Jet and Spike had stopped in that morning, each saying their own separate goodbyes.  Jet's had been a bit more formal, and had seemed like a much more long-term goodbye; it was evident that Jet didn't plan on seeing her for a while.  He was off to Jupiter, chasing a bounty, and didn't know when he'd next be on Mars for any extended period of time.  Spike?  Spike had buggered off to Earth that morning while Jet was preparing to leave.  He was on the hunt for Ed, and whether or not he actually found her would be another story indeed.

Spike's goodbye hadn't really been much of a goodbye at all.  He'd come in and sat down at the counter instead of a booth, ordered a cup of coffee and asked for semi-blackened toast (which Faye had to toast repeatedly in order to attain a satisfactory level of blackness), and read the paper.  Then he'd announced that he was going to Earth that day to scour the vast wastelands of Australia to find Ed, and that then he was headed back to the Bebop to meet up with Jet again.  Spike planned on finding Ed _that day_, and then what they did after that would be anyone's business.

"So?" Faye'd asked him, after his declarations, wondering what the hell all of that had to do with her.  "What do I care if you fly to damn _Pluto_ today?"

Spike sipped his coffee and shrugged.  "Sooner preferably than later you're going to have to come to the Bebop, too.  Remember?  My little plan?"

Faye, at this point, had launched into a tirade about how she couldn't exactly just drop everything and go to the Bebop whenever she felt like it.  She had rent to pay, a cat to feed, and a job to keep.  

"So when're you gonna quit this place and move out, then?" Spike asked, as if she hadn't said anything at all.

Faye groused and bitched and snarled, but at the end of all of it, Spike told her that he was going to find Ed, go back to the Bebop, and that if she wasn't there in a week's time _tops_, he was going to fly back to Mars and drag her to the Bebop by her hair, kicking and screaming all the way if he had to.  She was in, whether or not she wanted to be.

"I thought this was an _offer_," Faye had grumbled, leaning in close, not exactly wanting to talk about some grandiose plan for mint-robbing in the middle of the diner as if she were talking about a baseball game.  

"It started out as that," Spike had replied, staring up at her unflinchingly.  "But the ball is rolling now, and I never got a reply out of you about it, so I made up your mind _for you_.  We've got to get to work on this, and I'm quite sure that you're gonna need some fine-tuning of your dusty skills before I send you out into battle, and I don't know how much time I'm going to have for doing that."

"You asshole," Faye snarled at him.  "Fuck you.  I want out—not like I was ever officially _in_, anyways."

He stood up and pulled on his coat, folding up the paper and dropping some wulongs on the counter.  "One week," he said, grinning.  "Either meet us at the Bebop in a week ready to get to work on this or I'm coming for you, Romany.  I think you'd rather come on your own, because if I have to come and get you, I don't think you're going to like it."

In the middle of refilling someone's coffee, Faye found herself wondering how her cat (aptly named, 'Cat') was going to take to space travel.


End file.
